If you are dead, it is not possible that you can own land.
This is a simple logic that has generated countless cases of people registered as dead and dispossessed of their properties in India. And many have found that there is very little they can do about it, according to the BBC’s Chloe Hadjimatheou writes.
Padesar Yadav is alive and well, so it was a big surprise for him to find out that , according to a paper, he is dead.
At the end of the years 1970, after the death of his daughter and son-in-law, unexpectedly had He had to raise his two grandchildren .
To pay for his upbringing and education, he sold some land that he had inherited from his father in the town 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 case against me,” he recalls .
“He said that my nephew told them had said to everyone that I had died and that an impostor had sold the land. ”
Yadav immediately traveled from Calcutta where do you live now a, to the village in the Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. When he arrived, people were surprised to see him.
“They looked at me as if they were seeing a ghost and said: ‘You’re dead! We’ve already done mourning rituals for you! ‘”
Yadav says that he and his nephew had a close relationship and that the young man used to visit him when he traveled to the city.
But the visits stopped when Yadav informed him that he planned to sell the family land.
Then he learned that his nephew was claiming the land as his inheritance and Yadav confronted him.
“He said: ‘I have never seen this guy in my life. My uncle is dead. ‘ I was in shock ‘”, says Yadav.
“ I told him:’ I’m standing here, alive, right in front of you, how no can you recognize me? ‘”.
The Undead Association
Yadav says he cried for days, but then he pulled himself together and called the Indian Undead Association.
The organization is led by Lal Bihari Mritak, a man of about 60 years that you know something about being Declared Dead: He lived a third of his life as someone who had supposedly passed away.
Bihari comes from an extremely poor family.
He never learned to read or write because he was sent to work at 7 years to a saris dress factory. When I had 20 opened his own textile workshop in a neighboring city, but he needed a loan to start the 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 to the land he had inherited from his father .
The town accountant looked for his name and found the documents, but also found a death certificate that said Lal Bihari was dead.
Bihari’s claim was useless, who claimed that he could not be dead because he was standing there.
“Here in these documents, in black and white, says you’re dead “, they told him.
When Bihari’s death was registered with the local authority, the land and the properties he had inherited from his father had passed from him to his uncle’s family .
To this day, Bihari says that it is not clear if it was a clerical error or if his uncle ripped him off .
In any case, Bihari was broke. He had to close his workshop and his family was left homeless.
Poor, illiterate and low castes
But Bihari He was unwilling to give up and accept his supposed death without a fight, and he soon realized that he was not alone. People across the country were being scammed by relatives who declared them dead to seize their land.
That is how Bihari created the Association of Undead to bring all these people together and started a campaign to draw attention to their plight.
By one estimate, there are 40 . 000 undead 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 deceased Lal Bihari.”
Together with others in his situation, he organized protests to get media attention. But none of this was enough to make his status change.
Then he decided to stand in the national elections and managed to get the name of a dead person to appear on the electoral ballot .
When that was not enough to convince the authorities that he was alive, he almost committed suicide after three hunger strikes.
Finally, desperate, he decided to break the law by kidnapping his uncle’s son. He hoped that the police would arrest him and, in doing so, would be forced to accept that he was alive; after all, you can’t arrest a dead man .
But the police realized what he was trying did and refused to get involved.
In the end, Bihari found justice not as a result of her own efforts, but thanks to the very system that had changed her life.
A new district magistrate in Azamgarh examined his case again and decided that, 18 years after he was declared dead, Lal Bihari was alive.
Viewing your property through a fence
Bihari notes that through its Association of the Living Dead it has supported thousands of people across India who have faced similar situations.
Many of them, he says, have not been as lucky as him. Some have committed suicide after losing hope and spending years fighting their case, while others actually died before they could prove they were not dead.
Tilak Chand Dhakad is just beginning his fight. Currently, the man has 70 years and when you visit the farmland in Madhya Pradesh where you grew up, you have to look at it through a fence .
The old man has many health problems and knows that he may not live long enough to walk in those fields again.
Younger, Dhakad moved to the hoping to get a better life for her children and a higher income. While he was away, he rented his s land s to a couple.
It was when he returned to town to sign some documents that he discovered that was no longer the owner of the s earth s because he had supposedly passed away.
“The official from the local authority office told me that he was dead. I thought, ‘How could that happen?’ I was very scared, ”he recalls.
Dhakad says he soon discovered that the married couple to whom he had been renting the land had registered him as dead. The wife had gone to court posing as her widow and assuring that she was happy to give up the land.
When the BBC contacted with the couple that Dhakad accuses of taking over his property, the answer was that they did not wish to answer any questions.
Anil Kumar, a lawyer who has fought 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 to draw up false 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 combat corruption.
“In a country as large and diverse as India, there might be a few loose cases that crop up over and over again, but the majority (of the people) are protected by the good governance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi” , he added.
“If there is a case of corruption, there are enough provisions in Parliament to make sure the perpetrators are put to the test.”
But Anil Kumar says that when these cases are the result of a scam, justice can be difficult to achieve .
In a case he defended, it took him six years to prove that his client was v ivo, and more than 40 years later, he is still awaiting a verdict against the man who had allegedly declared his client dead.
“If these types of cases were accelerated for the criminal to be punished, it would instill fear in people and prevent this type of crime, ”says Kumar.
The fake birthday cake
It has been more than 45 years since Lal Bihari Mritak was declared dead and more than two decades since he managed to prove that He was alive.
But still organizes, every year, a birthday party , with guests sitting around a big cake . As the knife cuts through the frosting, it becomes clear to your guests that it is just a decorated cardboard box, a gimmick.
“Inside it is totally empty. So are 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 indicates that she still receives calls from people across the country who want her advice and help to prove they are alive, but with 88 years is losing steam s and is now contemplating retiring from the fight.
“I no longer have the money or the energy to lead the Association of the Living Dead,” he adds, “and there is no one to take care of it.”
He has always expected the national media to defend the dispossessed and for the government to clamp down on those who took bribes, but this has not happened.
The man who passed by 18 years of his life trying to prove that he is alive one day he will really be dead , without having achieved the changes for which he fought for a long time.
Piyush Nagpal, Ajit Sarathi and Praveen Mudholkar reported from the field.
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