Faizabad: 80-year-old Mohammad Sharif, popularly known as "Chacha Sharif" among the locals in Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh, has taken up a peculiar task of cremating unclaimed dead bodies in the district.
Clad in a Khaki Kurta-Pyjama; his well-groomed white beard and a brown skull cap adorn this octogenarian, who is determined towards preserving communal harmony in the country.
Sharif had lost his son Mohammad Rais Khan in 1992 to deadly communal riots which struck the state post-Babri Masjid demolition.
"My son, a fresh medical pass out in 1992, had gone to Sultanpur. He was killed there, and his body was nowhere to be found," Sharif tells CNN-News18, "I struggled to find his body for almost a month before police helped me trace his body."
Sharif came back and "vowed" that nobody was "a Hindu or a Muslim" to him. "Everybody is a human being," he says, "we are human beings first. We have the same blood. I don't discriminate between Hindus and Muslims when it comes to cremating or burying the bodies," Sharif tells CNN-News18.
Sharif is said to have cremated close to 25,000 unclaimed bodies and has a message for the country's politicians, too, who indulge in divisive politics.
They serve their own purposes, he says, "people die in hospitals," nobody takes care of them. “Politicians just come to woo the voter during the election season, make false promises, and leave," Sharif says.
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