Jawed Khurshid
Even the death belittles them. Their last wishes to get cremated post death with full honour did not get fulfilled. The two unclaimed bodies at Sangli Civil Hospital witnessed the worst on Thursday evening – dragged naked and then thrown in a small ditch to be a food for the wild dogs ubiquitous there, thanks to their apathy towards such cadavers.
When nobody came to claim these cadavers lying in the hospital’s mortuary, the health authorities handed them over to the Sangli Mahapalika late on October 30. The most inhuman angle to this story is that they handed over the completely naked bodies to the Mahapalika – without even a piece of cloth to hide their genitalia! The civic body workers loaded them on their garbage dumping container, despite a firm instruction in their rule book to use coroner’s vehicle to carry dead bodies to the cremation ground.
The garbage dumper took the two corpses to a cremation ground on Miraj-Pandharpur Road and disembarked the bodies there. They then tied the legs of the cadavers and dragged them till they found a small three ft long ditch there. They dumped them in this small grave and cover them with the soil.
Its noteworthy here that such improperly buried corpses are mostly devoured by wild dogs that roam around there in the wilderness of darkness. These savage canines dig up such loosely buried bodies and relishes on that.
It has snowballed into a major social issue, prompting the Commissioner of the Sangli Mahapalika, Ajit Karche to immediately form a 5-member fact finding team to look into the matter. He, however, assured the people to take stringent action against the guilty, once the probe is over.
