Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 06 August 2018 | Page 15

DIGNIFIED IN
DEATH Lal
Bihari declared
dead at 21, now
enjoys posing as
a dead man
dead in the “family register” and her share
in the land transferred to her mother-in-
law. She filed a criminal case against
them—it’s been pending for years. The
Mritak Sangh supported her. She sent
several memoranda to the chief minister
of UP as well as the PM. Both offices inter-
vened. Still, nothing stirred in the mortu-
ary-like silence of officialdom! Dhiraji
even threatened self-immolation in front
of the UP Vidhan Sabha in 2012. Finally, a
district official recorded her as alive in the
family register, but her name in the land
records was not updated. The in-laws
obj­ected, claiming she had married again.
I
N replies to RTI queries, the UP revenue
department said in 2014 that Dhiraji
was declared dead by a tehsildar’s order
in 1985. When she demanded a copy of
the order, they said the file had gone mis­
sing. She now lives in the gar­age of her
daughter’s small house in Mau. Her son-
in-law, a street food vendor, provides for
her and rushes around government offices.
She was sitting dazed and shrunk to her
bones on a bed, from which she rarely gets
up. Mumbling a few words, she screws her
eyes to look in the direction of voices with
her one good eye, which too seems greyed
by cataract. The other eye is shut and
covered by a few flies feasting on its dis-
charge. She is a legally deceased person.
And yet, she has an Aadhaar card. It gets
her nothing. No pension, no sops.
At Gonaipati, also in Azamgarh, an exec-
utive magistrate has come to apply closure
to Ramadhar’s case. The village pradhan
tells his story: Rama­dhar had migrated to
Bengal to work in a pharmacy, then ope­
ned a dairy with a few cows. Some seven
years ago, the pradhan learnt his family
was trying to sell their land, without giving
Ramadhar his share. When the pradhan
fished him out from Bengal, he found
Ramadhar was dead on the family register.
The district resurrected him in 2015 and
now he waits to get possession of his land.
“Some cases are genuine errors by the
lekhpal,” says the magistrate. “Often there
is no way to contact a person and confirm
he’s alive, especially if he has migrated. So,
a relative can turn up with other ‘witnes­
ses’ and give false testimony.” Corruption,
of course, isn’t unheard of, he admits.
In the 1970s, Bal Kishun and Ram
76-year