The 'walking dead' of Uttar Pradesh are back in the news again. The High Court will take up another curious case for hearing on January 15, where a living person who was wrongly declared deceased has demanded compensation of Rs. 25 crore for the period in which he was declared dead in government revenue records.
The court has directed the district magistrate of Azamgarh in eastern UP, where the matter pertains to, to take appropriate action in the matter.
The petitioner, Lal Behari ‘Mritak,’ who hails from Azamgarh district, has filed the case asking for compensation. Lal Behari, a resident of Azamgarh, never thought in his life that he would have to fight for 18 years to prove that he is alive. He was declared dead in revenue records in 1976, when some relatives bribed revenue officials to usurp five acres of his land. It took him 18 years to be reborn in government papers, when the records were corrected. Lal Behari was officially declared alive on June 30, 1994.
Interestingly, Lal Behari came to know about this ‘paper death’ when he went for a bank loan.
While struggling to prove his existence, Lal Behari found out that he was not alone as a victim of such land-grabbing tactics, but there are hundreds of walking dead like him in Azamgarh. The first step he took was to add a prefix mritak (dead) to his name.
Then he formed a body of similar victims and named it the Mritak Sangh (association of dead). “The motive behind the move was to shake up the administration and to prove that we are alive,” he said. He founded the association in the late 1970s.
Presently, the association has hundreds of such walking dead members across entire UP. “It is a major fraud and the administration has adopted an ostrich-like policy in this connection,” said Lal Behari.
His continuous efforts to make these 'dead' alive bore fruit and 221 people declared dead in revenue records were declared alive in 2008 after his association had organised a mass movement in Lucknow and New Delhi. A couple of years ago, he had organised a march of around 100 waking dead people in Azamgarh to open the eyes of the administration.
Earlier, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court had also taken up the case of compensation to living dead—on a writ petition filed in 2005 by Lal Behari Mritak. Lal Behari has sought compensation of Rs. 25 crore from the state for having lost his immovable properties and for the ordeal that he went through during his 18-year-long fight.
In order to prove that he was alive in revenue records, Lal Behari did many interesting things like kidnapping a boy so that an FIR could be registered against him in government records and contesting Lok Sabha elections against former prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and V.P. Singh in the late 1980s.
Now, he spends his whole time fighting for those who have been declared dead in government records. A couple of years ago, filmmaker Satish Kaushik had announced a plan to make a biopic on him with Anil Kapoor, but the film is yet take off.
