India’s rights panel wants law for dignity in death – but marginal groups first need dignity in life

In the searing short-story Kafan (Shroud), written in 1936, Munshi Premchand tells the tale of a lower-caste woman named Budhiya who dies writhing in the excruciating pains of childbirth while her father-in-law and husband attempt to arrange wood, fuel and a shroud for her funeral.

Bound by shackles of bondage, debt and hunger Budhiya’s corpse eventually receives no shroud laying bare the deeply fractured social system in which dignity in death for the most marginalized is altogether absent.

Nearly a century later as SARS-CoV-2 cannibalises India’s dead and living, a similar hollowness of mortal dignity is luridly visible. If dignity is central to the imagination and instantiation of justice, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued, then the Indian state has failed its living and dead on all ethical and moral counts. In this light, the National Human Rights Commission’s recent recommendations to the Centre and states to enact a special law “upholding the dignity and protecting the rights of the dead” during Covid-19 boldly underlines the Indian state’s chronic failure to provide intersectional health justice for its subjects.

An ambiguous record

Undoubtedly the question of dignity in death is not and should not just be restricted to Covid-19. Upholding the dignity of the dead only in crises is as futile as pinning the…

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