Look, I don't have any stake in this. I don't even have any steak in it. But it interests me that those coming out against allowing Hindu funeral pyres in the UK seem unable to produce an argument of substance against them. I've already said why pointing out the present state of the law, as the Times did, isn't decisive - because the issue is what the law should be. There are criminal wrongs that are wrongs in themselves, so-called mala in se crimes; and there are crimes that are wrong only because they are prohibited, mala prohibita. If the funeral pyre is in the latter category and no independent moral reasons can be produced why it should remain there, then considerations of freedom ought to prevail. The Times's appeal to prevailing social mores also doesn't clinch it, since the mores that prevail can in many instances prevail with other mores flourishing alongside them to nobody's detriment. Not everything is like needing to drive on the same side of the road.
I don't intend to enter the dispute over what the optimal conditions are for the soul departing the body, but Jay Lakhani's contention that use of funeral pyres would go against Hinduism's 'forward-looking, evolving' character, and Sathnam Sanghera's, that Hindus in Britain have moved on, strike me as no better than the argument that the practice should remain illegal because it is illegal. They beg the questions, respectively, of whether this is really forward or on rather than sideways. In face of them, Poorna Shetty's plea to be able to choose for herself carries force.