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Community Cannot Claim Local Body Land for Cemetery: Allahabad High Court
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News18•14-10-2026, 22:15
Community Cannot Claim Local Body Land for Cemetery: Allahabad High Court
- •The Allahabad High Court ruled that the right to freedom of religion does not grant a community the entitlement to claim specific local body land for a cemetery.
- •The bench of Justices J J Munir and Indrajeet Shukla dismissed a petition filed by the Christian Community Welfare Society regarding barren land in Ghaziabad.
- •The court stated that converting local body land into public-utility land is an executive decision involving multiple factors and is not a justiciable right.
- •The petitioner had challenged the Ghaziabad district magistrate's order declining to earmark 0.342 hectares of barren land in Visokhar village as a cemetery.
- •The society argued that Christians faced hardships during funerals because the existing cemetery in Begamabad Budana is running out of space.
Key Questions Answered
No, the Allahabad High Court ruled that the right to freedom of religion does not entitle any community to claim local body or gram sabha land for a cemetery.
The ruling came while the High Court was dismissing a writ petition filed by the Christian Community Welfare Society, which challenged the rejection of its request to convert barren land in Ghaziabad into a cemetery.
The court observed that converting land entrusted to a local body into a public-utility land like a graveyard is an executive decision, and nobody has a justiciable right to seek such conversion.
