The body of a Dalit woman was taken off a funeral pyre in Uttar Pradesh by a group of upper-caste men who said she could not be cremated on communal land, police said on Tuesday, a case that prompted angry calls for an end to caste discrimination.
The funeral was being held last week when about 200 men stopped the cremation going ahead, saying the site was not meant for lower-caste villagers, police and the woman’s husband said.
“My family and I… begged them to let us perform the last rites but no one listened to us. The police were also called but nothing was done,” said Rahul Bajaniya, the woman’s husband.
“We had to take the body to a different cremation ground, which is about four kilometres (2.5 miles) away, and perform the last rites there,” he said from Kakarpura village, which lies close to the Taj Mahal.
Bajaniya said caste discrimination in the village was so entrenched that people from higher castes “even object to us when we fetch water from the (community) hand-pump”.
An online video showing men removing firewood from the pyre as a body lay on the ground had been viewed nearly 2,00,000 times by Tuesday.
