India, Feb. 20 -- The moral strength of a democracy is not measured only by how it protects its living citizens; it is also evaluated by how it treats the dead. In recent years, reports have emerged from certain Indian states that members of the Christian community have faced local opposition when attempting to conduct burials in public cemeteries. These disputes have largely arisen in contexts marked by social tensions over religious conversion, mistrust in majority-minority relations, and informal village-level systems of social control.

Such incidents cannot be dismissed as merely local social problems. They raise fundamental questions concerning posthumous human dignity and the scope of constitutional rights. Are the fundamental righ...