Setting an example of religious harmony, a group of Muslim youths in India cremated body of a Hindu neighbour with all traditional Hindu rituals including consigning the ashes to the nearby river and taking a dip in the river after the cremation.

The incident took place in Sheikhpura village of Manikchak block in Malda district on India-Bangladesh border, about 350 km away from Kolkata in India, reports Hindustan Times.

Neighbouring Muslims carried the body of Biswajit Rajak, 35, a Hindu who died on Monday, on their shoulders for a distance of three kilometres to the crematorium and even chanted the name of Hari following the Hindu tradition.

Rajak’s family is too poor to pay the crematorium and associated charges.

He was suffering from liver cancer and died at his home on Monday. But when his family could not arrange his cremation on Tuesday, villagers gathered at his house and requested Biswajit’s father Nagen Rajak to allow them to cremate his son, according to the report of the Indian newspaper.

Even the Imam of the local mosque also went to the crematorium. The Muslim neighbours paid the money necessary for his last rites. The Rajaks are one of the two Hindu families in the village of about 6,000 residents.

“I had neither the money nor the manpower to take my son to the crematorium. I don’t know what would have happened if the villagers didn’t come forward for the last rites of my son,” Rajak’s father, Nagen Rajak, with tears streaming down his eyes, told local journalists.

Abdul Khalek, who took the lead in arranging the last rites, told the Indian newspaper, “No religion preaches hatred towards others. Biswajit was like our brother. Allah wouldn’t have forgiven us if we looked the other way thinking that the family follows some other religion.”

The Muslim neighbours of Rajak also paid for his treatment and arranged to send him to a hospital in Kolkata. Apart from his father, Rajak is survived by his wife and three daughters, according to the HT report.