By CJP Team
On December 15, 2025, seven days ago, in Kanker district, Chhattisgarh, a province in the central part of India, the father of Rajman Salam, an elected sarpanch (village headman), was buried according to Christian rites on the family’s farmland. This is the traditional way of conducting burials in the area. Barely had the burial taken place, soon thereafter, a large mob allegedly incited villagers with a claim that under the PESA Act, they had a right to exhume the body. The mob asserted the land belonged to a local deity, and that a Christian burial was impermissible at the spot!
This is a macabre repeat of three years ago. In November 2022, in the same region, an elderly Christian woman, Chaitibai, in Krutola village, Chhattisgarh, was denied burial space by village authorities, forcing her son to use family land.[1]The family had initially been denied access to the village cemetery and was directed to bury the deceased on their own land. Subsequently, villagers and local political leaders attempted to exhume the body using a tractor, but the police prevented this attempt. The following day, however, the police themselves exhumed the body and reburied it in the Christian graveyard in Anantgarh pursuant to the orders of the District Collector.
A press release of the United Christian Forum has expressed alarm at the ongoing situation in Chhattisgarh. All these cases follow a documented pattern of violence and hostility against Tribal Christians.
Cases in Chhattisgarh, Odisha[3], and Jharkhand reveal coordinated intimidation. Burials are becoming contentious and politically charged. Grieving families are forced to face violent mobs, forced exhumations and forced conversions of faith.
This story was originally published in cjp.org.in.