A Tibetan Buddhist sect and bone smuggling in northeastern India

Jun 25, 2007 13:24 GMT  ·  By

Indian smugglers do not trade only with the bones of the endangered tigers, but also with those of their co-nationals. Indian police has arrested a gang of four men in the city of Jaigaon, who had hundreds of human skulls and thigh bones which they were going to pass into the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for use in Buddhist monasteries.

"During interrogation they confessed that the hollow human thigh bones were in great demand in monasteries and were used as blow-horns, and the skulls as vessels to drink from at religious ceremonies," said investigating officer Ravinder Nalwa.

This is the second bone capture in West Bengal (northeastern India) since April, making the police suspect that the area could harbor a much extensive trade in human bones and some bones could go much further, to Thailand and Japan. "Officers found the latest collection in Jaigaon, a town in eastern India on the border with Bhutan, and arrested four people who said they were smuggling them across the border," Nalwa told Reuters.

In April, a "human bones factory" was found in the area and six people were arrested for illegal trade with human skeletons, but they believed the bones were delivered to medical students and for use in traditional medicine. Both bone captures seems to have rooted in Varanasi, a Hindu holy city in northern India where millions of dead people are incinerated annually on the banks of the Ganges.

"The skeletons seized in Jaigaon had all come from Varanasi's cremation centers and all these years we thought they were just going secretly to medical students," said Nalwa.

In the past, Eastern India was a flourishing center for the export of human skeletons, which reached even western Europe, but this stopped in the late 1980s after human rights associations revealed how the bones were being collected and the government prohibited the practice.

Still, this did not impede the underground trade, the bodies being collected from the river, as well as from Hindu cremation centers where poor people cannot afford enough wood to perform a complete cremation. In many cemeteries close to the border the graves are desecrated and dug out especially for skulls and limb bones.

Bhutanese authorities doubt that all the bone quantity was going to Buthan.

"We have never come across such large-scale cases before, maybe one or two," Ninda Wangdi, a senior Bhutanese police officer, told Reuters.

Indian Buddhist monks confirmed that human thigh bones and skulls were employed by a Tibetan Buddhist sect. "But one or two bones would last a lifetime, so a racket this huge might have links to other countries," said Bhikkhu Bodhipala, chief priest of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya.