The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed that there shall be no exhumation of bodies in a Chhattisgarh village following complaints from a minority organisation that bodies of tribal Christians are being forcibly exhumed and reburied at distant places as they had converted.
Restraining further exhumation, the court issued a notice to the Chhattisgarh government, seeking its response within four weeks to the petition filed by the Chhattisgarh Association for Justice and Equality alleging discrimination against converted Christian tribals by members of the majority community.
“Issue notice, returnable within four weeks. In the meantime, it is provided that no further exhumation of the buried bodies shall be permitted,” a bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and N.V. Anjaria said in a written order.
The bench passed the order after senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, representing the organisation, brought to the court’s notice the alleged large-scale exhumation of bodies of tribal Christians who were being reburied at far-off places without the knowledge of the families.
Gonsalves said that in one case, the body belonging to the mother of a member of the petitioner organisation was forcibly removed by people from the majority community and reburied far away from the village.
The argument was that those who had converted to Christianity cannot bury bodies in the local villages, instead they should be buried in notified Christian cemeteries. The deceased had wished to be buried in her own village, the petition said.
In another instance, the body of the husband of a tribal woman was exhumed by locals and reburied 50km from the deceased’s village.
Gonsalves complained that such illegal activities are not being curbed by the Chhattisgarh government, which he said was taking advantage of an earlier split verdict by a two-judge bench on a similar issue relating to the burial of a converted tribal Christian in his own village, which was not allowed by the villagers.