ICC Note:

In the majority Hindu nation of Nepal, religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims, face discrimination and persecution at many points of their lives. Unfortunately, death has become one point in which religious minorities struggle with the majority. For many, it is difficult to find burial ground to lay their loved ones to their final resting place. In many cases, there is no space in existing burial grounds and the government has been unwilling to sanction more space. 

6/30/2015 Nepal (Anadolu Agency) – Over the years, Nepali Muslims took part in protests demanding representation in the state structure, joining dozens of ethnic and regional groups agitating in the country’s eastern hills and Tarai plains.

But Muslim leaders say the state has continued to be discriminatory, denying them even basic rights to burial sites.

“A state doesn’t have a religion, but its citizens can follow any religion. Every religious community should be able to follow its rituals and practices. But the state has treated us like third-class citizens,” Roshan Kharel, a local Muslim leader, told Anadolu Agency.

“If the state allows us to be born as Muslim, it must also allow us to die as Muslim. And that’s when the issue of burial grounds becomes really significant for us. We have been struggling for it for several years but to no avail,” said Kharel, a former Hindu who converted to Islam during a stint as a migrant worker in Qatar.

The Muslims of Rajahar are not the only community that feels threatened and discriminated.

In Hetauda, a town of Makwanpur district, about 60 miles east of Rajahar, Christians face a similar ordeal.

“We don’t have any designated space for burial. We have buried our dead on a plot that belongs to a Hindu temple but we often face resistance from locals and temple authorities,” said Prashant Dev, a local Christian leader and publisher of a monthly Christian newspaper.

He said the Christian members of Makwanpur district, home to 22,000 Christians, have often fought for the designation of a burial ground.

“We have organized protests demanding a burial ground; I have led several delegations to the local administrator and forest office, but nothing has come out of it,” Dev told Anadolu Agency.

With the local authorities turning a deaf ear, he said, his community members were forced to buy land for a graveyard or donate to some of the 300 churches in the district to secure the burial sites.

When Nepal was hit by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in April, nearly 10 percent of fatalities were Christians, who were in the middle of a weekly congregation.

Christians in Nepal congregate on Saturday – the day of the quake – taking advantage of the country’s single-day weekend, said C. B. Gahatraj, a pastor and general secretary of the National Federation of Christians, a 5,700-member organization.

“Unfortunately, the districts that were hardest hit—Gorkha, Dhading, Sindhupalchok, Nuwakot and Kavre—are also places where most Nepali Christians live. That morning, they had gathered for prayers. So the congregants were killed in the earthquake,” he said, adding that the quake destroyed 93 churches and damaged 500 more in central and eastern Nepal.

Out of a total 8,844 victims of the quake, 778 were Christians, with most buried while praying in two neighborhoods of the capital Kathmandu and in several hamlets of the badly-hit Sindhupalchok district. While many agree on the numbers of the dead, there is no consensus on the nationwide population of Christians in Nepal. The national census puts the figure at 300,000 while Christian leaders claim there are 2.5 million.

“After the earthquake, lack of space for burial in Kathmandu forced us to move the bodies to the districts where they came from. We had been demanding burial grounds even the day before the earthquake,” Gahatraj told Anadolu Agency.

The minority religious group has fought a long and hard battle for burial grounds.

In early 2011, the issue of Christian cemeteries came to the fore after the Pashupati Area Development Trust, an autonomous body that oversees the country’s oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, said it would no longer allow non-Hindus to use the Shleshmantak forest for burials.

While dozens of bodies are cremated everyday on the banks of the Bagmati River in the temple premises, Christians secretly buried their dead in the nearby forest.

A prolonged legal battle and hunger strikes ensued. After a 40-day relay hunger strike in May 2011, the government agreed to meet the Christian community’s demands for burial grounds and formed a high level committee to look into the issue.

A year later, with the committee dragging its feet and the government reluctant to provide space for a cemetery, the Christian community resumed the public protests.

“Despite our protests and after several pledges, the government has failed to address our grievances. The state simply is not paying any attention to our plight,” Gahatraj said.

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