India's living dead
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What would it be like if everyone believed you were dead? Lal Bihari knows exactly what that feels like. When he was 22 years old the Indian farmer was told by his local government office that he was dead and no protestations that he was standing before them would persuade the bureaucrats otherwise – after all, his death certificate was there as proof. Whether the victim of a scam or a clerical error, the end result for Bihari was to lose his business and all the land he was hoping to inherit. It took him more than two decades to reinstate himself among the living during which time he tried everything from going on hunger strike to kidnapping someone in the hopes that the police would be forced to concede that a dead man could not be arrested. Today, more than a quarter of a century later, Bihari runs the Association for the Living Dead of India through which he says he has helped thousands of people who have fallen victim to the same thing. He tells his extraordinary story to Chloe Hadjimatheou for Assignment.
Production Team in India: Ajit Sarathi; Kinjal Pandya; Piyush Nagpal and Praveen Mudholkar Editor: Bridget Harney
(Image: Lal Bihari holding a banner for the Association of the Living Dead. Credit: Piyush Nagpal/BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Imagine you wake up one day. |
| 0:02.4 | It's a day like any other. |
| 0:04.4 | But today, although you feel perfectly normal, |
| 0:07.5 | you find out that actually you're dead. |
| 0:11.6 | Yeah, that's right. |
| 0:13.1 | Dead. |
| 0:16.6 | I said I'm Lal Bihari. |
| 0:22.3 | The administrative officer said, |
| 0:23.9 | I don't care who you are or whether you are standing in front of me. |
| 0:28.2 | It says here in the papers in black and white that you're dead. |
| 0:33.6 | This isn't some surreal Kafka novel. |
| 0:36.8 | It's real life. It happened to this man and it's happening to others. |
| 0:41.9 | All across India, people who are very much alive are finding out that they've been registered as dead and there's very little they can do about it. |
| 0:51.4 | You're listening to Assignment on the BBC World Service. My name's Chloe |
| 0:56.4 | Hajimuthayu, and this is the story of India's living dead. |
| 1:08.4 | Laal Bahari lives in the huge northern state of Uttar Pradesh. I can't travel there because of the |
| 1:14.9 | coronavirus pandemic. But my colleague Ajit Sarathi, who's from Delhi, went. Bahari's village is in |
| 1:22.2 | Azamgar province. It's called Halilabad, and it only has around 100 households. |
| 1:27.9 | So when Ajit stops to ask directions to Bahari's house, people know exactly who he's talking about. |
| 1:40.8 | I don't think there are any formal addresses there. |
| 1:44.1 | It's like a very small community. So when I asked |
| 1:47.0 | these guys about the way to his place, everybody around knew about him. And probably I assume that |
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