By Team
EVEN IN THE grave, Chamru Ram Salam found no peace. After a mob gathered to protest against the Christian manner of his burial, the police dug up his corpse and sped off with it. His family’s performance of the last rites—caught between tribal custom and the dead man’s religious faith—spiralled into a village dispute.
Other such exhumations have been captured in harrowing WhatsApp videos in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. To stop Christian burials, locals have vandalised prayer halls and torched homes. Police sometimes intervene by removing the offending body. The deceptively welcoming term for the movement behind such clashes is ghar wapsi, Hindi for “homecoming”. The idea is that, because the deceased’s ancestors were originally Hindu, conversion to “foreign” religions like Islam or Christianity denies their “real” Indian identity. In Badetevda, the scare tactics have worked: seven Christian families have “come home” to Hinduism.
This story was originally published in economist.com. Read the full story here.
