Deadly campaign

The controversy over the disposal of the dead in the community has once again spilled over into the national Press. Sixty-five-year-old crusader Dhun Baria was featured on the front page of the Mumbai Mirror (MM) tabloid of August 30, 2006 that is distributed with The Times of India daily to around eight to nine lakh homes in the city.

Baria: fiesty fighter

"My pictures are so shocking that no Parsi wants to see them,” read a four-line front page headline featuring Baria’s photo.

The fiesty lady has been distributing video CDs of the bodies lying haphazardly in the Towers of Silence and in clumps in the bhandar (well) of the dakhmas. She has also circulated photographs of the dakhmas’ interiors which MM stated they "refrained from publishing… given the sensitive nature of the issue.”

The graphic video images shot almost fully from the scaffolding supporting the solar concentrators make for ghastly viewing. Bloated, naked bodies, limbs hanging from the edge of the pavis, skeletal structures piled up one on top of another, pyramid shaped in the bhandar, bodies strewn over the pavis, recognizable faces on some of the corpses…