KINDNESS IN DESPAIR
DETERMINED THAT NOBODY BE DENIED THEIR LAST HONOURS, THIS GOOD SAMARITAN IS NOW EXTENDING THAT DIGNITY TO IMPOVERISHED COVID VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES
ITIS 9.30 PM AND JATINDER SINGH SHUNTY is sitting in an ambulance in a parking lot in Jhilmil Colony, fielding calls asking him to pick up and cremate Covid victims’ bodies. “I’ve been living in this ambulance in the parking lot for 21 days now,” says the former BJP MLA, twotime councillor from East Delhi and parttime real estate agent. Since his entire family has Covid, he can’t go home and risk the infection. The ambulance is his bedroom as well as command centre. He also uses it instead of a car to move around in the city. “You never know when you may be asked to take someone to the hospital or pick up a Covid victim’s body,” he says.
Shunty and 22 volunteers from the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal (SBSSD), an organisation he founded in 1995, have cremated 3,551 Covid victims in Delhi since the pandemic broke out in March 2020. Of these, 2,199 cremations have taken place just between April 1 and May 16. “We have worked 16-18 hours at a stretch this time,” he says. “In the magnitude of deaths and the heartless manner in which people have died, this tragedy compares to Partition or the 1984 antiSikh riots and Bhopal gas tragedy.” Using their fleet of 18 ambulances, Shunty and the volunteers start the day early, picking up bodies from hospitals or homes where people have died. They sanitise the bodies, pack them in plastic covers and bring them to crematoriums, primarily the Seemapuri facility, which they have taken on lease from the MCD.
Shunty’s service predates the pandemic. He founded SBSSD when the sight of a poor villager gathering halfburnt wood from pyres at Nigambodh Ghat to cremate his own child shook him. Since then, he has helped cremate 44,000 people: mostly unclaimed or whose kin were too poor to pay for the funeral. Friends and donors have pitched in with funds. “It is not my effort but God and Guru Tegh Bahadur who’re working through me,” he says. Widely recognised for his work in national and international media, he won the Padma Shri this year.
What inspires him to do a task traditionally considered ‘unclean’? “I am guided by the Gurbani verse: De Siva bar mohe ihe, shubh karman te kabahun na tarun (Grant me this boon, O lord, that I do not turn away from doing a good turn),” he says. Our conversation is interrupted by a call from Vineeta Johari, 59, a schoolteacher in Ahmedabad, who lost both her parents on April 29-30. She had retrieved his number from a TV show. Calling him “a living saint”, she tells him, “It was because you kept my mother’s body for a day at the crematorium morgue that I could cremate her. I want to touch your feet.” For Shunty, that’s another ode to his Guru. ■
IN TERMS OF DEATHS, THIS TRAGEDY COMPARES TO PARTITION OR THE ANTISIKH RIOTS —JATINDER SINGH SHUNTY