Legally dead man desperate for life

NEW DELHI: An Indian man, who was declared dead in 2003 and has for five years been protesting his plight demanding authorities legally recognise he is alive, failed in his efforts to file his candidature for president on Wednesday in his second such attempt to draw attention to his case.

Dressed in a skeleton suit and armed with a placard reading: ‘‘I am alive’’ in both English and Hindi, Santosh Kumar said he has tried everything to have authorities fix an error that has meant he has been legally dead for more than a decade.

On Wednesday, his symbolic attempt to present his candidature for the presidential race was turned down after he failed to submit a copy of his identity document.

‘‘The same thing happened to me in the 2012 elections: how am I going to produce an identity document if I am denied that very thing because they say I am dead?,’’ Kumar asked.

Kumar said he left his village in northern India to try his luck in Mumbai working as a cook for a famous Bollywood actor.

There he fell in love with and married a woman belonging to the ‘‘untouchable’’ group — the lowest rung in accordance with the Hindu caste system — which outraged his family.

‘‘Following a 2003 bomb blast in Mumbai, they reported me missing and I was given up for dead,’’ Kumar explained, adding his cousins then usurped his valuable lands.

When he first approached the police, he said, he was told to keep silent and threatened with death ‘‘not just on paper’’.

In his native state itself, he said, there were 50,000 other people like him, alive but declared dead due to police malpractices, which was what he intended to highlight in filing his symbolic presidential candidature.

‘‘I am not trying to recover my land nor get compensation; I am fighting for a cause that affects many more people,’’ Kumar said.