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If you are dead, you cannot own land.
It is a simple logic that has generated countless cases of people registered as deceased and dispossessed of their property in India. And many have found that there is little they can do about it, writes the BBC’s Chloe Hadjimatheou.
Padesar Yadav is alive and well, so it was a big surprise for him to learn that, according to an article, he is dead.
In the late 1970s, after the death of her daughter and son-in-law, against all odds, she had to raise her two grandchildren.
To pay for his education and education, he sold the land he had inherited from his father in the city where he was born.
But a few months later, he received a strange phone call.
“The man to whom I had sold the land called me to tell me that there was a legal action against me,” he recalls.
“said my nephew I had told everyone that I was dead and that an impostor had sold the land.
Yadav immediately traveled from Calcutta, where he now lives, to the village of Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh in central North India. When he arrived, people were surprised to see him.
“They looked at me like they saw a ghost and said: ‘You are dead! We have already done mourning rituals for you! ‘”
Yadav says that he and his nephew were close and that the young man visited him when he went to town.
Corn the visits have stopped when Yadav informed him that he was planning to sell the family land.
He later learned that his nephew was claiming the land as his inheritance and Yadav confronted him.
“He said, ‘I’ve never seen this guy in my life. My uncle is dead.’ I was in shock, ‘”says Yadav.
“I said, ‘I’m standing here, alive, right in front of you, How can you not recognize me? ‘“.
Association of the Living Dead
Yadav says he cried for days, but then pulled himself together and called the Indian Association of the Living Dead.
The organization is headed by Lal Bihari Mritak, a man in his sixties who knows something about being declared dead: he has lived a third of his life as someone who was supposed to be dead.
Bihari comes from an extremely poor family.
He never learned to read or write because they sent him to work for 7 years in a saree factory. When he was 20, he opened his own textile workshop in a nearby town, but he needed a loan to start his business and the bank asked him for a guarantee.
He went to the local government office in his village, Khalilabad, also in Azamgarh district, hoping to obtain the deeds of the land he inherited from his father.
The town’s accountant searched for his name and found the documents, but also found a death certificate stating that Lal Bihari was dead.
Bihari’s claim was pointless, who claimed he couldn’t be dead because he was standing there.
“Here in these documents, in black and white, say you’re dead“, they told them.
When Bihari’s death was registered with the local authority, the land and property he had inherited from his father had passed from him to his uncle’s family.
To this day, Bihari says it is not clear if this was a clerical error or if your uncle ripped you off.
In any case, Bihari was broke. He had to close his workshop and his family found themselves helpless.
Poor, illiterate and lower castes
But Bihari was unwilling to give up and come to terms with his supposed death without a fight, and he soon realized that he was not alone. Across the country, people have been scammed by relatives who declared them dead to take over their land.
So, Bihari created the Association of the Living Dead to unite all these people and started a campaign to draw attention to their plight.
According to one estimate, there is 40,000 living dead only in the state of Uttar Pradesh, most of them poor, illiterate and low caste.
Bihari added the suffix mritak to his name, which means “the deceased”, and was renamed “the late Lal Bihari”.
Along with others in his situation, he organized protests to attract media attention. But none of this was enough to change his status.
Lal Bihari Mritak (right) in 2015, with a farmer declared dead by his brother.
Then he decided to run for national elections and include the name of a deceased person on the ballot.
When that was not enough to convince the authorities that he was alive, he nearly committed suicide after three hunger strikes.
Finally, desperate, he decides to break the law by kidnapping his uncle’s son. He hoped the police would arrest him and in doing so, be forced to accept that he was alive; after all, you can’t stop a dead man.
But the police realized what he was trying to do and refused to get involved.
In the end, Bihari found justice not through her own efforts, but through the same system that had changed her life.
A new district magistrate in Azamgarh re-examined his case and decided that 18 years after being pronounced dead, Lal Bihari was alive.
See your property through a fence
Bihari notes that through his Association of the Living Dead, he has supported thousands of people across India who have faced similar situations.
Many of them, he says, weren’t as lucky as he was. Some committed suicide after losing hope and spending years advocating for their cause, while others died before they could prove they weren’t dead.
Tilak Chand Dhakad is just beginning his fight. Currently, the man is 70 years old and when he visits the farmlands of Madhya Pradesh where he grew up, he must look at her through a fence.
The old man has many health problems and knows he may not live long enough to walk these fields again.
Younger, Dhakad moved to the city in the hope of securing a better life for his children and a higher income. During my absence, rented his land to a couple.
It was when he returned to town to sign documents that he discovered that I no longer owned the land because supposedly he had passed away.
“The local authority office official told me he was dead. I was like, ‘How could this have happened?’ I was very scared, ”he recalls.
Dhakad claims he quickly discovered that the married couple he had rented the land from had registered him as dead. The wife had come to court posing as her widow and claiming that she was happy to cede the land.
When BBC made contact With the couple whom Dhakad accuses of having repossessed their property, the answer was that they did not wish to answer any questions.
Anil Kumar, a lawyer who has battled several undead cases, estimates that in Azamgarh, the province where Lal Bihari lives, there must be at least 100 people who have been declared dead prematurely.
Each case is complex, he says. Sometimes there are clerical errors, other times public officials are bribed for them to write fake death certificates.
Shaina NC, spokesperson for the ruling Indian People’s Party (BJP), told the BBC that the current government has been very diligent in enforcing legislation to fight corruption.
“In a country as large and diverse as India, there may be a few isolated cases that crop up over and over again, but the majority (of the population) is protected by the good governance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” he said. -he adds.
“If there is a case of corruption, there are enough provisions in Parliament to ensure that the perpetrators are put to the test.”
But Anil Kumar says that when these cases are the result of a scam, justice can be hard to get.
In a case he defended, it took him six years to prove his client was alive, and more than 25 years later, he is still awaiting a verdict against the man who allegedly declared his client dead.
“If these types of cases were speeded up for the criminal to be punished, it would instill fear in people and prevent these types of crimes,” says Kumar.
The fake birthday cake
It has been more than 45 years since Lal Bihari Mritak was pronounced dead and more than two decades since he managed to prove he was alive.
But still organize a birthday party every year, with guests seated around a large cake. As the knife cuts through the frosting, it becomes clear to your guests that this is just a decorated cardboard box – a gimmick.
“Inside, it’s totally empty. The same goes for some government officials: empty and unfair“, complaint.
“I didn’t cut this cake to celebrate. It’s a summary of the society we live in.”
Bihari says he is still getting calls from people across the country wanting his advice and help to prove they are alive, but with 66 years old is losing strength and now he plans to retire from combat.
“I have neither the money nor the energy to run the Association of the Living Dead,” he adds, “and there is no one to take care of it.”
He always expected the national media to defend the dispossessed and the government to crack down on those who take bribes, but that did not happen.
The man who spent 18 years of his life trying to prove he’s alive one day he will be really dead, without having made the changes for which he fought for a long time.
Piyush Nagpal, Ajit Sarathi and Praveen Mudholkar report from the latter.
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