In an order passed on November 21, Justices R Subramanian and K Kumaresh Babu said that at least after death, one must be spared of caste based discrimination.
“Though 75 years have passed since independence, we are unable to break the shackles of casteism and even the secular Government is forced to provide for separate burning and burial grounds on communal lines. Equality has to commence at least when the person travels to his/her maker,” the Court said.
The Court, therefore, said that the government that represents a “secular state” must consider constructing common burial grounds in villages and districts, without any caste based distinction.
The court was hearing a batch of pleas filed by some villagers from Salem district seeking implementation of a writ court’s order permitting the tehsil level authorities to exhume a dead body that had been buried at a plot of land, which was not a designated burial ground for the “Scheduled Caste and the Backward class communities,”
The Court was also seized of a batch of pleas challenging that order.
The writ court had allowed the pleas by some residents of the same village, who had claimed that the appellants in the present case had buried the dead body of their mother on a plot of land that was actually a designated ‘cart lane.’
The appellants, however, argued that while there were two designated burial grounds in the village, one for SC/STs and OBCs, and the other for the remaining communities, it was common practice for their community to bury the dead at the said plot.
The plot in question was not entirely a cart lane, the appellants contended. They told the court that while the cart lane ran through the middle of the plot, the dead from the community had been buried on the left side of the cart lane. They also submitted a list of the dead, whose bodies had been buried on that left side.
The Tamil Nadu government told the Court that there was no State imposed restriction on burials at undesignated burial grounds at the Panchayat level. Such restrictions were applicable only within city limits, the government said.
Source: Barandbench
