This is not a fictional sob story. It is the tragic reality of a family which had to struggle for three weeks to bury their dead – only because of their religion. The matter reached the Supreme Court on 27 January and the same day, the administration pressurized the family members into burying their deceased father at Karkapal, about 45 km from their village.
This case of blatant religious discrimination has been reported from the Chhindwada village under Darbha Police Station area in the Jagdalpur district of Bastar division, Chhattisgarh. This is a Scheduled Area under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. The Gram Sabha, quoting ancient customary social practices, barred the burial of a non-Hindu (Dalit Christian) within the boundaries of the village.
Have the Adivasis started considering themselves as Hindus? Have they begun “othering” the Dalits and the Christians?
Subhash Baghel, a Christian, died on 7 January. His son Ramesh Baghel wanted to perform his last rites at the burial ground in the village. But the Gram Sabha, the conservator of customary law and traditions, decreed that Subhash cannot be buried in the village burial ground. On 9 January, Ramesh Baghel moved the Chhattisgarh High Court, which concluded that burial at the village may lead to “unrest and disharmony amongst the public at large” and directed the petitioner to bury his father at the Christian burial ground in Karkapal. The petitioner then appealed the decision in the Supreme Court.
The two judges of the Supreme Court bench which took up the case (Ramesh Baghel vs State Of Chhattisgarh) could not reach a consensus. In the judgment, pronounced on 27 January, Justice B.V. Nagarathna ruled that the body may be buried in the common burial ground of the village while Justice Satish Chandra Sharma said that the burial can take place only in a designated Christian graveyard. But as the body had been lying in a mortuary since January 7, the judges refrained from referring the case to a wider bench and instead chose to direct that the body be buried in the Christian cemetery at Karkapal village, about 20-25 km away from the ancestral village of the deceased.
Those in the know say that the affidavit of the state government, which the top court accepted unquestioningly, was misleading in the sense that Karkapal was 45 km away from the deceased’s village and that as per government documents, the village did not have a Christian graveyard.
The two judges of the Supreme Court, thus, allowed themselves to be misled. Worse, they also directed the state and its local authorities to demarcate exclusive sites as graveyards for burial of Christians throughout the state. This directive will have nationwide implications.
In fact, this judgment seems to bolster the impression that the non-Hindus and members of the marginalized communities would be treated as second-class citizens in the Hindu Rashtra. It also indirectly mandates that the administration would be required to set up separate crematoriums, graveyards, schools, colleges, roads and hospitals for and assign different professions to the people from the more than 6,000 castes, many religions and communities. This will cause deep divisions in the country.
The fact is that the family members of the deceased faced discrimination and socio-economic boycott because they happen to be Christians. The family have been Christians for the past three generations and their ancestors are buried in the graveyard in the village.
The local Gram Sabha claimed that the village graveyard can only be used for the burial of Hindu Adivasis – and not Christians. The incident at Chhindwada reminds one of the barbaric Aryan social order in which the traditional bearers of powers ruled the rural areas, where non-Hindu religions and their ways of worship were banned. Not only were the marginalized communities pushed out of the village borders, but their dead also dug out from their graves and dumped outside the village. At the root of the issue is the Gram Sabha, which has been constituted in keeping with the customary, traditional social order. Ironically, the Gram Sabhas have been constituted under the PESA Act with the objective of re-establishing village republics. The PESA Act cannot override the provisions of clauses 1 and 2 of Article 15 of the Constitution, which say:
- The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.
- No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to –
(a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment; or
(b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.
But the PESA Act is being used by the customary Gram Sabhas to violate the fundamental rights of the Dalits, Adivasis and non-Hindus in the Scheduled Areas. They are being denied access to the Public Distribution System. They are not able to get their children admitted to schools and are facing problems in obtaining birth, death, caste and social-status certificates. The objective is to deny them benefits of government public welfare schemes.
There is little doubt that birth-based caste and gender-based discrimination are the pivots of Indian society. Every village is an upper-caste empire and an impregnable fortress of the concept of high and low and caste-based discrimination.
About 76 years ago, our ancestors had quit their primitive social system and embraced the Indian Constitution, with its democratic underpinnings. But it is ironic that our apex court is still protecting the social beliefs of the Aryan age, and in the name of “preserving public order”, is thrusting an unjust segregation on the country.
The Supreme Court decision, by advocating separate facilities for a particular religion and community, will push the non-Hindus and religious minorities further to the margins of society.
(Translated from the original Hindi by Amrish Herdenia)
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