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Minority Rights: Unsettling crisis for religious groups
KATHMANDU, JAN 27 -
With rapid unplanned urbanisation and mounting population pressure in Kathmandu Valley, religious minorities like Muslims, Christians, Bahá’í and others, who don’t cremate dead bodies, are facing serious burial space crunch.
Muslims in Kathmandu, for instance, have almost run out of burial space. The only cemetery in Swoyambhu was build decades ago when Kathmandu was a very small town and the Muslim population was negligible. “After we ran out of burial space, we have been compelled to dig older graves and bury new corpse in them,” says Taj Mohammad Miya, coordinator of the United Muslim National Struggle Committee (UMNSC), which successfully led the Muslim movement last March.
In a six-point agreement inked after the Muslim movement, the government had agreed to address, among others, the graveyard space crisis facing the community through a separate Muslim commission, which is yet to be established.
The problem of burial space for the Bahá’í community, is even more complicated. In Bahá’í law, the deceased must be buried no more than one hour away from the place of death. The community had been using a cemetery in Lalitpur for the last three decades. But since the last one-and-half-year, locals have not permitted the Bahá’í people to use the cemetery. “It’s really disturbing that we don’t have space to bury if anyone dies,” says Larry Robertson, Chairman of National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Nepal. “We bought the two-ropani patch of land in Lalitpur for our cemetery in 1977 when there was no house around there. But later, the area got crowded, and now people don’t allow us to use the cemetery.”
Robertson says the government should either provide a burial site or make legal provisions which allow religious organisations to set aside land for a cemetery, and these burial lands should be recognised by the government.
The Christian community, who make up about 0.5 percent of the country’s population, is also not immune to this problem.
“Finding a proper burial place may not be a problem for members of rich churches, who have bought lands for their cemeteries on the fringes of Kathmandu, but it is a serious problem for the poor,” says Phanindra Bhusal of National Council of Churches of Nepal. There are over 300 churches in Kathmandu alone. They maintain either joint or separate cemeteries, which have now become a source of conflict with locals as more and more houses are being built around cemeteries that were once desolate areas.
Bhusal says this is likely to create further tension among people of different religions. “We are hopeful that the new constitution will ensure our rights, including the right to burial space.”
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