Villagers exhume bodies for rain

Nine bodies cremated; tahsildar warns residents

 Driven by the blind belief that burying people who had leucoderma would lead to scanty rainfall, people in Chirakanahalli village in the taluk on Friday exhumed nine bodies and cremated them.

According to the residents of Chirakanahalli, located on the fringes of the Bandipur National Park, their village had not been receiving sufficient rainfall though it rained normally in the neighbouring villages. 

In a meeting held to tackle the issue, it was concluded the burial of dead bodies with leucoderma was the root cause for the scanty rainfall. Since it was not possible to identify the bodies with leucoderma, the villagers decided to exhume all the 12 bodies buried in the past three years and cremate them, with the consent of the family members of the deceased persons.

Accordingly, nine bodies were exhumed and burnt on Friday. It is said that the job was entrusted to group of eight men for Rs 10,000.

Tahsildar Ranganath visited the village on Saturday and explained to the villagers that exhuming bodies without permission from the assistant commissioner amounts to an offence. 

He also convinced them that their reasoning for scanty rainfall was a blind faith.The tahsildar said that the villagers had given an undertaking stating that the they exhumed the bodies out of ignorance and that such incidents would not recur in future.The body of a seer, who had leucoderma, was exhumed for a similar reason in Narasamangala village of Chamarajanagar taluk, recently.