Row over cremation of Dalit man: 13 booked in Gujarat

According to the FIR, upper caste groups denied a Dalit man access to a common cremation ground for his father's last rites.

The Vadodara district police on Friday booked 13 people including a village sarpanch for denying access to a common cremation ground for the last rites of a Dalit man. The FIR stated that due to protest from the upper caste villagers, the dead body was cremated about 200 metres away from the cremation ground in the open land belonging to the local panchayat.

The police said that the incident occurred in Gametha village in Padra taluka of Vadodara district on Wednesday evening. The FIR, filed by Rajnikant Vankar, 35, a resident of Vankarvas in Gametha village, states that Vankar's father, Kanchan, had passed away on Wednesday. Vankar and his relatives collected wood for the funeral pyre and kept it at the local cremation ground.

He returned home to take his deceased father for the final rites when he got a call that a villager, Raisang Padhiyar, had come to the cremation grounds, asking for the removal of the wood kept for the funeral. Vankar went back to the cremation ground, where he found that the pile of wood he had collected had been removed.

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The FIR says that Padhiyar and few other villagers told Vankar he couldn't use the cremation ground since he was from a Scheduled Caste. According to police, the village has separate cremation grounds for upper castes and Dalits. In the FIR, Vankar stated that since the Dalit community crematorium was inundated with water, he wanted to use the other one to cremate his father.

Subsequently, Vankar dialled the police for help. A police team arrived and Vankar's father was taken to the cremation ground where a group of people from Padhiyar community had gathered in protest against the cremation. Vankar said that group threatened to take his life if his father got cremated there.

The FIR says that his community leaders and other villagers agreed to cremate his father about 200 metres away in the open land of the panchayat so that "the environment of the village is not spoiled."

The accused include village sarpanch Nagin Padhiyar, Ashok Padhiyar, Vijay Parmar, Ghanshyam Padhiyar, Bhadabhai Padhiyar, Chandrasang Padhiyar, Magan Padhiyar, Raisan Padhiyar, Raman Padhiyar, Arvind Padhiyar, Mangal Padhiyar, Bhampo Padhiyar, and Balwant Padhiyar.