Denied a sacred space

 

Two years since controversy erupted over the ban on Christian burials next to the Pashupati premises, and a viable solution has yet to be implemented, forcing the community to resort to desperate means to lay their dead to rest

Along the banks of the Trishuli in Nuwakot, a jeep is speeding on, tunneling furiously into the night. As the vehicle sails forth like a silent animal, roadside settlements pass by in a blur of mute houses and shuttered shops, interspersed by long stretches of dark nothingness.

It is 11.36 pm when the jeep suddenly swerves into a bend and jerks to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Miles away from the nearest settlement, there are no visible landmarks or signs of human habitation here—only the Trishuli hissing softly on the left while a thicket of trees looms on the right. The car’s headlights are turned off, and the door on the driver’s side tentatively pushed open. A man steps out, looking around cautiously before indicating to his companions in the car to join him. Two others are soon on their feet beside him, and together, the three approach the car’s back door. It opens to reveal two dead bodies lying next to each other, both covered in some sort of cloth one can’t make out the colour of at this time of night.

The two men carry the dead on their shoulders as they follow the driver, who is walking ahead with a torch in one and two shovels in the other, leading them into the forest. None of them are saying much to the others, heavy breathing and the crunch of pebbles and leaves underfoot the only sounds around.

Once they get to a flimsy clearing amid the trees, shovels are stuck into the ground and earth sent flying as two separate graves are quickly dug. When sizeable openings have been created, the bodies are deposited gently within these and covered once more with chunks of forest floor. It is then a walk back to the car, a sprint past sleeping villages, and back in the direction of Kathmandu from whence they’d come.  Despite what the clandestine nature of this little sojourn might invoke in most imaginations, this was not a chapter out of some gruesome real life murder mystery. In fact, one of the dead comprised of an 83-year-old man who had passed away of heart failure in the Capital; the other a 62-year-old woman whose cancer had metastasised to the point where doctors—even those in India—could not treat her, and had eventually met a protracted end as the disease ate away at her. How did these two end up in the jeep? The answer is fairly simple: They were Christians, and there was no place in the Capital to bury them. At a loss for a viable alternative, this is what most in the Christian community here have been compelled to do ever since the burial ground crisis surfaced in Kathmandu about two years ago—drive bodies outside the Valley and bury them in random spots away from densely-populated settlements, more often without the knowledge of the locals, who would no doubt kick up a fuss if they were to be informed.

Grave problems

“It’s obviously not ideal, but what can we do? We don’t have any other options,” says CB Gahatraj, the chairman of the Federation of National Christian Nepal (FNCN). “We’ve been pushed into a corner.” The dead, he adds, are presently being ferried to Dhading, Trishuli, Rautahat, Sindhupalchowk, and Kavre on most counts, occasionally even as far as Surkhet, to be laid to rest.

Gahatraj despairs of the ‘indignity’ the Christian community has suffered at the hands of concerned government authorities with regard to the burial issue, a denial of religious rights that he says is ironic in a supposedly secular country. “It’s been over two years since we’ve been campaigning for the problem to be addressed, but authorities are still in the process of ‘holding talks’ while we’re left to make our own arrangements,” he says. “What is there to debate?”

The dispute over burial space for Christians—who make up only about 1.4 percent of the country’s total population—first erupted when the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) decided to bar all non-Hindus from burying their dead in the Bankali forest on the temple’s premises in January of 2011. Sushil Nahata, the then-member secretary of the PADT, explains that the directive had been taken to preserve the sanctity of Hindu ground. “Once the Bankali area had already been taken up by graves, the cemetery was beginning to expand outwards, threatening to encroach on the Hindu shrines in Pashupati,” Nahata says. “It is the government’s duty to ensure that the Christians are allocated a proper and separate burial space.” He adds that as an autonomous body, the PADT would never compromise on retaining the purity of the temple complex, which is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.