The smiling gentleman in the picture below shouldn’t be anywhere near as happy as he appears — according to his government; Mr. Lal Bihari was dead as a doornail when the picture was taken. Bihari was mistakenly named “deceased” in 1975 when he was only 20. A wicked legal trick from one Bihari’s uncles, who wanted to take over a piece of property owned by his nephew and had bribed officials to have him declared dead.
It wasn’t until 1994, aged 39,
that the Indian farmer was officially declared “alive” once again. He had to
fight bureaucracy like crazy in order to have his “dead” status revoked. [1]
Mr. Bihari discovered,
during his crusade, that there were many others like him who were officially in
the great beyond while being physically alive. At some point they had over
20,000 members. The dead-on-paper people were at serious risk — like with
Bihari, others in this predicament often had their property taken over by
relatives conning them. The new owners would, in some cases, try and kill their
victims.
Lal Bihari organized his own
funeral, attending it in person. He ran for higher office (unsuccessfully). He
even signed his own name with “Bihari (deceased)”. Still, the slow-moving
officials had the man languish in legal and societal limbo for almost two
decades.
Footnotes [1] Lal Bihari - Wikipedia
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