Several years back, a policeman in Lucknow, capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh, knocked at the door of my neighbour, a young engineer, and asked him, “Are you Shyamal Bose?”

“Yes. What’s the matter?” he asked with understandable anxiety that comes when you suddenly face a cop in uniform.

The policeman replied, “We have recovered your body from river Gomati. Please come to the police station.”

Basu was stumped. “My body?” he asked nervously to confirm he had heard correctly.

It turned out that Shyamal never tore off letters written by his mother in her own handwriting out of reverence. Instead, he always immersed them in the river. Some of the letters bearing his Balda Road Colony address floated down close to an unidentified body.

The area police concluded that it was of Shyamal. Thus, the police declared a living person as dead. This was not an isolated incident.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most populated state, declaring a hale and hearty person as dead is a widely prevalent phenomenon — a notorious practice that goes on unchecked, somehow the epicentre being Azamgarh district, some 200km east of the State’s capital Lucknow.

In the earlier case, it was police but in most other cases, it is the revenue and civic officials who bluntly tell the person standing in front of them that he was dead long ago. Not only the lower but middle-rank officials refuse to take cognisance of solid proofs that show him alive and kicking. They go strictly by their records that show him dead. The ‘Living Dead’ issue has been coming to the fore frequently but things refuse to change, thanks to the money power that makes the babu (clerk) enter in the records what the bribe giver wants.

The malaise seems to have stemmed from Azamgarh district which has an agrarian population with hadly any other opportunities to make a living. So, the region’s bullies or close relations and sometimes even the children of agricultural land owners bribed the revenue officials to declare the owner dead and managed to get the land registered in their name.

Land being scarce and fragmented in this Uttar Pradesh district it is ‘might is right’ for both the rich and the poor to “steal” the land of an absentee and vulnerable relative, including widows. The land record keepers charge a meagre fee for declaring the living as dead which mirrors the level of impoverishment in the region.

Most other ‘living’ beings having no money, no brains and no strength could not prove themselves alive so they chose to remain dead in the government records. One such hapless person was of the view that it was better to remain dead on paper than to be really dead. He feared that his cousins who grabbed his land might kill him.

Out of the umpteen number of living dead only one , Lal Bihari, who was declared dead in 1976, mustered courage to fight for his ‘life’ against ‘death’ forced on him in the government records. Standing before UP’s revenue officials he said, “Look, I am here. I am alive”. But the official said that might be so but their records say he is dead.

Lal Bihari did not lose courage. On discovering that he was not the only living dead and that UP had a crop of this species, he floated an organisation called ‘Mritak Sangh’ (Association of the Dead). Soon, it started attracting a number of people of his ilk. Several “dead souls” from far and near started meeting him at his ‘ghost house’ in Azamgarh seeking restoration of their stolen property. Sadly, however, they all remained ghosts or ‘Living Dead’.

Whoever tried to go to the court to recover his lost land was threatened with dire consequences, meaning death, or lost the case in the maze of India’s judicial system.

A farmer gave up saying it was better to be dead on paper than to be really dead. This game of bribing corrupt revenue officials to usurp the lands of widows, the weak, hapless and any temporarily absentee owner makes things easy for the grabber. He does not have to actually murder a person yet he gets the land of his choice, all with the help of a petty bribe.

The tragedy is that such blatant practices go on in every field unbridled and unchecked contrary to claims of ushering in a utopian dispensation and good governance.

Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.