This working paper explores the challenges that emerge when public health measures to mitigate the risk of infection during an epidemic infringe on the rights of religious communities to say a final farewell to their loved ones according to their custom. The paper aims to answer these questions: how does epidemic response in the context of death and burials frame and impact religious minority rights? And in turn, how do sectarian dynamics reposition themselves in the context of epidemic response?

I explore the conflict between biomedical understandings of death and funerary practices within epidemic responses, and religious minorities’ freedom of belief and practice. I show how epidemic response is a secular project, and how its latent religious values linked to the creation of the nation-state generate particular dominant discourses of what is appropriate in death-related policies during epidemics. I also explore how relationships between dominant and minority religions, and other social dimensions, may shape the negotiation of ‘safe and dignified burials’.