DEAD MEN BAULKING AT UNTIMELY DEMISE
Ian MacKinnon meets a group of "dead" people fighting to prove they are alive.

The Australian - Monday June 14th, 1999.

Death, as the cliche goes, comes to us all sooner or later. But for a group of people in India, it came sooner than expected, while they remained very much alive.

Members of Mritak Sangh,or the Dead Persons Association, have been campaigning to prove they are still in the land of the living.

It is an uphill task, as 10 of the estimated 10,000 living dead discovered when they staged a sit-down protest outside government offices in the Uttar Pradesh State capital, Lucknow.

Many have been fighting their cases for up to 25 years and at least two have actually died while trying to prove they were alive.

The association claims most are victims of greedy relatives who report a person dead and have the land of the deceased transferred to their own name, with the connivance of corrupt officials.

Few discover it until much later, when India's stifling bureacracy makes it all but impossible to reverse the process and bring the dead officially back to life.

The association's founder, Lal Behari Mritak, is among those who have gone to extraordinary lengths over many years to win justice.

He contested two elections against former prime ministers V P Singh and the late Rajiv Gandhi just to prove he was alive. He also committed a kidnapping to force police to register a case against him. And finally his strategy paid off.

But others are not so fortunate. Many have spent years shuttling between the district councils, State bureaucrats and the High Court, attempting to win their fight for life.

The oldest to take part in the protest was 85-year-old Jhulari Devi, who was deprived of her land in 1974.

Her relatives declared her dead in the family register and got her land transferred to their own names, claiming they were her only relatives.

The death certificate and application of land claim was accepted, she said.

Later the 1 ha of land was transferred to them.

"I came to know of it when my relatives forcibly ousted me from my land," she said.

Mr Beharis said since many were officially dead on the records, they ran the risk of being killed by those who grabbed the land.

During the protest, he handed over a six-point charter that demanded the State government launch a special inquiry and conduct a survey to establish the true scale of the problem.