Chennai, July 20 -- It took more than two decades of struggle for a Dalit Catholic to get a resting place in the common cemetery for Catholics at Kottapalayam, a dusty village in Trichy district of Tamil Nadu, in the early hours of Monday.
The body of the deceased, A. Raju, a retired teacher, was kept waiting for three days before it could be buried in the common cemetery, which had been tightly guarded by dominant-caste Reddis who claimed it as their exclusive preserve.
The sprawling cemetery was just 300 metres away from the deceased's house on the main road. So far, no Dalit Christian had been buried there, while the Church hierarchy looked the other way and took no steps to address the issue, forcing Dalits to knock on the doors of th...