India’s colonial-era land laws give powers to land revenue officials to declare a person dead, a declaration that’s nearly impossible to overturn.
Bihari said his Dalit identity played a crucial role in delayed justice, but adds that he’s seen people from all castes, religions, genders or creeds in these cases. “The victims are usually the weak links in society,” he said.“In this regime of private land ownership, land is increasing in its value and people want to own more and more of it, no matter how.”
After registering a police complaint against his relatives, Singh contested local elections, threw himself on politicians’ cars and joined an indefinite protest in New Delhi. Unlike Bihari, he’s not been successful in being declared alive. “Local authorities have become Yamraj [the Hindu God of death] for the people they’re supposed to serve. Everyone is complicit,” Singh told VICE World News. Legal recourse is a distant dream for Singh. One can’t just prove their existence by showing up. The process of filing the case, gathering evidence and witness verification is tedious before it even reaches trial, and is prone to endless delays, corruption and land revenue officials who are stretched too thin to show up at court. Singh’s case hasn’t even reached the trial stage yet. “I wasted so many years chasing lawyers, paying hefty fees and losing my livelihood,” he said. “I’m reduced to a beggar now and at the mercy of people who buy me food and clothes.”“Violence and land grabbing reflects a form of power play.”
In their police complaint, Devi’s eldest daughter Mansha and son-in-law Om Prakash say Devi, a widow, was wrongfully declared dead twice—the first time in 2005, and then again in 2010—in official records, while another fraudulent record included a second marriage which never happened. The police complaint blames Dhiraji’s husband’s family for falsifying official data to grab 3.5 acres of land that she inherited, and was supposed to go to Mansha. Now, Prakash and Mansha are carrying on the legal case.“The system is such that justice is delayed and therefore denied.”
He claimed the documented number of these crimes in the state is only 2,000 to date, and said that the local authorities have always taken swift action against the accused, including government officials named in the police complaints. “Land-related crimes are a distant dream now for culprits,” he said. “Earlier, all land records were manually written, and therefore prone to being falsified. Now these records will be updated online in real time. Anyone can open the website and check from anywhere in India.”He added that in his district, there are no pending cases either. “The police complaints might be getting investigated, but we will solve cases at the courts as soon as I get them,” he said. But in rural India, this kind of digitisation is lost to many who don’t have a computer, let alone an internet connection. When VICE World News met with victims of this crime, many didn’t even have a phone. Some are in the informal labour sector. One of them, Umashankar Chaube, a vegetable vendor in Varanasi who has no phone or internet connection, was declared missing and presumed dead in 2014, allegedly by local gangs who wanted his land.Last year, the Anti-Corruption Organisation found that the revenue officials topped the list of all government servants caught red-handed taking bribes in the last five years.