If Davender Ghai gets his way in the case due to be heard on Tuesday, traditional Hindu cremations could become commonplace across England and Wales.
In 2006, Newcastle City Council blocked Davender Ghai's attempt to establish the UK's first approved site for open-air funeral pyres.
It maintained the burning of human remains anywhere outside a crematorium was prohibited under the 1930 Cremation Act - a ruling the Ministry of Justice agrees was correct.
Now Mr Ghai, a Hindu campaigner and founder of the Anglo Asian Friendship Society charity, is seeking a judicial review of the decision.
"I believe a person should live and die according to his own religion," said the Uganda-born 70-year-old, who has been living in the UK since the 1970s.
"Local authorities routinely provide separate Muslim and Jewish burial grounds and out-of-hours registration and immediate or weekend burials.
"Hindus should cremate before the following sunset too and yet we, along with the general public, wait for up to a week."
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4 comments:
I am interested as a fellow funeral director as to what your opinion is on this, not just for religious purposes. Do you approve?
There's got to be one law for all. There can be no justification for giving people with supernatural beliefs a special pass to go to the front of the queue or do something different.
The same goes for means of disposal. Open air cremation would be popular with a small sector of the population. It raises questions of pollution, of course, but let's not forget that mercury from dental amalgam will be quite a short-lived problem, since it is no longer a constituent of fillings. Let's not forget either that it was only a few years ago that we subjected thousands of cattle carcasses to open-air cremation, with no dire environmental fallout.
The length of time it presently takes to arrange a burial or cremation discriminates against anyone who simply wants to get on with it. It is almost impossible in this country to hold a home funeral, when the body remains at home until the day of the funeral, because 3 days is about as long as it is sensible to keep a body cool but unrefrigerated.
Funeral pyres, Viking funerals, bring em on, I say! But: No exceptions!!
As Mr Ghai said "Hindus should cremate before the following sunset too and yet we, along with the general public, wait for up to a week."
Well I think that's only fair really. Burials can and do take place quicker because there is a lot less paperwork and as funeral directors know, if there is a question over cause of death after a burial then the person could be exhumed....obviously this cannot happen after a cremation and that is why the paperwork is so thorough.
As to weather I approve, mmm, I’m all for doing things differently and personalising funerals but i feel we all aren’t ready for funeral pyres in the UK just yet.
There is one thing we are forgetting here - the NIMBY's. Suffolk had to wait a long time for a woodland burial site as nobody wanted it 'in their backyard'. I suspect the same would be true of a funeral pyre.
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