24 January 2019
Mrtak Sangh
Posthumous lives.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Right, that’s enough misery. This column has considered nothing else for the last fortnight. Not a very cheering start to the new year, even if January is the dreariest month. So let’s have something heart-warming from the newspapers this week.
Sidney disappeared from his home in Brandon, Co Durham, in 2016. As time went by, Sharon Fox, his nearest and dearest, gave him up for dead. So imagine her joy this week – three years after his disappearance – when someone phoned her with the wonderful news that they’d found him, only twelve miles away, and traced her via his microchip (yes, Sidney is a cat). Instant happy ending. Ahhhhhh.
Bear with me, please, all those of you who think I’m lowering the tone of Shaw Sheet with this piece of tabloid trivia. Because I want to ask a serious question; what if Sidney wasn’t a cat but a human being? What would happen if a human being was declared dead while they were still alive?
Unlikely? Well, you may remember the case of Mr Chen of Guangzhou from a year or two ago. He applied to the police for an official document stating that he had no criminal record, but the application was refused. The police insisted that he was a criminal and – what’s more – that he was dead; he’d been executed in 2006, they said, having been sentenced to death in 2003 for crimes (including kidnapping) committed in 2001. It seems that there are (or were) two Mr Chens of Guangzhou, both somehow with the same national identification number.
Another story in the news this week suggested that the living dead are even more common in India than they are in China, and face an even bigger bureaucratic nightmare. A charity – Mrtak Sangh (“Deceased Union”) – has been set up for all those sentient people who have somehow been officially declared dead, to help them to get re-registered as living. Such people are usually victims of identity fraud. If someone moves away to find work or take up a new job, it isn’t unknown for unscrupulous neighbours or relatives, greedy for the absent individual’s land or property, to spread the rumour that he or she has died, have them officially declared dead, and then claim the assets of the “deceased”. It isn’t difficult to pull off in a country where local government is often inefficient and corrupt and the population far from the big cities is frequently undocumented. It’s very difficult to correct, however, because of the vast, complex and confusing bureaucracy of the country’s often Kafkaesque civil service.
The association’s president, Lal Bihari, was himself declared dead in 1977 by grasping relatives who coveted his property. They had his name erased from official land records. His struggle to get himself reinstated as a living human being took nearly twenty years.
This week, he and his organisation Mrtak Sangh announced a plan to field ‘dead’ candidates against prime minister Narendra Modi in the general elections due in May. This campaign – an attempt to publicise the plight of the officially dead but actually living – was fittingly launched from a crematorium in the city of Azamgarh.
It’s more than likely that he and his candidates will do very well indeed. After all, consider the case of Dennis Hof who was elected to Nevada’s state assembly last November, even though he was dead. Actually dead, not merely officially dead in some virtual bureaucratic universe. He died on October 16 last year (on his 72nd birthday, as it happens, while he was celebrating with stars of the adult entertainment industry – he was the owner of legal brothels and the star of the HBO series “Cathouse”), but it was too late to remove his name from the ballot. Being dead didn’t stop anyone from voting for him, however. He beat his Democratic opponent by an overwhelming 36 points.
His case was bizarre for all kinds of reasons, but it wasn’t unique. He was merely following in the ghostly footsteps of many fellow US politicians:
Mel Carnahan, governor of Missouri, died in a plane crash on October 16 (same date as Dennis Hof – spooky) in 2000, while he was running for US senate. Missouri law prevented his name from being removed from the ballot. He won the election.
Carl Robin Geary Snr died of a heart attack in March, 2010, while he was campaigning to be mayor of Tracy City, Tennessee. He won the election a month later. By 268 votes to 85.
Patsy Mink, US senator for Hawaii, died in September 2002 – too late to remove her name from the ballot for the primary which was due just one week later. She was re-elected to her seat that November.
House majority leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana and House representative Nick Begich of Alaska were killed in a plane crash on October 16 (that date again – spooky!), 1972, but they were re-elected to the House a month later.
And there are others: Clement Miller (representing California’s 5th district in Congress, re-elected a month after his death in a plane crash in 1962), James J Rhoades (re-elected to the state senate of Pennsylvania after his death in a road accident in 2008), Jenny Oropiza (Californian state Senator, re-elected after her death in 2010) and Harry Stonebraker (re-elected mayor of Winfield, Missouri, with 90% of the vote, weeks after his death in 2009).
I don’t suppose any of them could have done much worse, posthumously, than the zombie living-dead political leaders who are at large in Europe today, dead duck targets of no confidence votes or impotent victims of parliamentary minorities; Germany’s Angela Merkel, Belgium’s Charles Michel, Sweden’s Stefan Löfven, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Greece’s Alexis Tsipras or our own Theresa May, whose two and a half years in power have so far been a tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, despite her admirably dogged efforts.
Sidney the cat couldn’t have done much worse, during his two and half years away from Brandon, Co Durham. I wonder if Sharon Fox could be persuaded to take a leaf out of Mrtak Sangh’s book and field Sidney as a candidate in the UK elections which many believe are forthcoming this year?
