India’s Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion, have the right to bury their dead in public cemeteries, effectively ending the practice of illegal exhumations reported in the state of Chhattisgarh.
The decision follows a series of incidents in villages in the southern part of the state where bodies of deceased Christians were forcibly removed from communal burial grounds.
According to a report by the Vatican’s Fides News Agency, the exhumations were carried out by individuals opposed to the spread of Christianity who refused to allow deceased Christians to remain buried in shared cemeteries.
The ecumenical United Christian Forum (UCF) welcomed the ruling, calling it a significant development for minority rights.
“This ruling is a fundamental step forward in protecting the dignity of the deceased and respecting the religious and cultural rights of Christian communities,” the group said.
The Supreme Court stressed that obstructing burials in public cemeteries carries criminal consequences and underscored that burial grounds traditionally open to all villagers cannot be informally restricted to specific religious groups.
The ruling builds on an injunction issued in December 2025, when a court ordered an immediate halt to the exhumation of bodies in Chhattisgarh.
The injunction followed a complaint filed by local lawyers and doctors, who documented cases in which Christian families saw their deceased relatives forcibly removed from graves in communal cemeteries.
The complaint also described how cemeteries historically used by all residents had been unofficially reserved for certain religious communities, effectively excluding Christians. In some cases, families were compelled to bury their dead up to 50 kilometers from their homes.
It further criticized local police and authorities for failing to protect Christian families from discrimination and urged the state to intervene to safeguard communal cemeteries in order to maintain social and religious peace.
Michael Williams, president of the United Christian Forum, called on the Chhattisgarh government to ensure the court’s decision is implemented.
“The court’s ruling is now clear, and the Chhattisgarh government must implement it to prevent further suffering for grieving families and to uphold constitutional rights,” Williams said in a statement sent to Fides.
The United Christian Forum recorded 23 funeral-related incidents in 2025 and identified what it described as a “systematic pattern of intimidation, violence, and discrimination against members of Indigenous Christian communities.”
