Identity Crisis

A man assumes his younger brother’s identity to satisfy the age criterion for a job. So began a decades-long saga

GOPALAPURA ~ Every morning, when Gopalapura Seenappa Shivanna wakes up, he looks in the mirror and touches his face. He wants to reassure himself that it is still his face, that he is still alive. One can’t blame this 52-year-old farmer from a nondescript village 150 km west of Bangalore—his late older brother, GS Raghu, stole his identity.

Though Raghu is dead, Shivanna has been worried about it ever since he found out Raghu had used his name to get into the Army. Even Raghu’s death certificate bears Shivanna’s name. On paper, GS Shivanna is dead.

The elaborate fraud of Raghu passing off as Shivanna would not have come to anybody’s attention had there not been a family dispute when Lance Naik Raghu, honourably discharged from the Army, returned to settle down in his native village in Karnataka.

Tracing the fraud back through the years, Shivanna discovered that in the early 1980s, Raghu, the elder by three years, had applied for and received Shivanna’s seventh class certificate from Nonavinakere Government School, where both had studied. Shivanna’s certificate made Raghu eligible to join the Army as a driver, placing him below the age limit for enrollment.

“I checked the school records [recently] and discovered that Raghu had signed in his own name while receiving my certificate. Nobody guessed any bad intentions, as it was common for a family member to collect another’s certificate. But instead of handing it over to me, he gave it to the Army recruitment office and became ‘GS Shivanna’ in their records,” says Shivanna.

Through this simple act, Raghu passed himself off as GS Shivanna during the entirety of his 20-odd years of military service as a permanent driver in the Army Supply Corps (ASC).

When Raghu told his family that he was selected by the Army, nobody knew he had committed a fraud. Living in a village of only 20 families back then, they didn’t miss him, and he came home only a couple of times. After marriage, he took his wife along with him, and their kids, too, were born and brought up wherever he was posted.

Meanwhile, Shivanna settled down, tended to his land, got married and raised a family. He never approached his school for his certificate as he never needed it.

After Raghu retired from the Army sometime in the mid-2000s, he applied for the job of a security guard with the State Bank of Mysore, which was recruiting ex-servicemen. Once employed with the bank in nearby Tiptur town, Raghu and his family—wife Mangalamma and daughters Usha and Mithuna—moved into their family home in Gopalapura village.

The house and land were both in the name of their mother Jayamma. The property had been informally divided among the three brothers, including the eldest, Rangappa. Jayamma wrote and signed the partition deed on a non-notarised white sheet of paper.

Though the property has been divided among the brothers, it has to be submitted officially on stamp paper, for which proof of identities is required, before the property can be registered in their names. “The police and the tehsildar have told me it is a grave matter and that it will be difficult for me or my family to inherit the property if this confusion persists,” says Shivanna.

Trouble began as soon as Raghu moved in and announced he wanted to sell a part of the land to raise money to build a house. Shivanna was confused, because Raghu tried to sell the land by posing as Shivanna. When he objected, things turned ugly and Raghu assaulted Shivanna, who promptly lodged a complaint with the Nonavinakere police.

This was when he first learnt of the identity theft. But village elders and even the police persuaded him not to pursue the matter against Raghu. They said Raghu had given them a written undertaking, promising not to threaten or harm Shivanna again. He even signed the letter as Raghu, but since no one asked him for any proof of identity, the matter was laid to rest.

A year later, Raghu and his family moved into their new home, built adjacent to the ancestral home. Within weeks, Raghu fell seriously ill and had to be referred to Command Hospital in Bangalore, where he was diagnosed with kidney disease. He died in October 2011.

Now, a property dispute with Raghu’s wife has reignited the case, and Shivanna feels he may be cheated of his share. Mangalamma has a death certificate in the name of GS Shivanna and is receiving pensions from both the Army and the bank.

When Shivanna dug a little further, he found that Raghu and his wife had been putting together a stack of documents to further the identity fraud. They saw to it that their daughters’ school documents listed their father’s name as GS Shivanna, as he was in service then, even though their daughters’ voter ID cards mention ‘GS Raghu’ as their father. Villagers allege that she has applied for an Aadhaar card where the husband’s name has been mentioned as ‘late GS Shivanna’.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Shivanna himself has an electoral photo ID card and a ration card with his photo and name correctly printed. The ration card also carries the names and photographs of his family of four—wife Siddagangamma, son Mahesh and daughter Deepashri.

This family has been able to lay their hands on a crucial piece of evidence: Raghu’s real voter ID card, with his photograph and name entered as ‘GS Raghu’. He had applied for his voter ID after taking up employment with the bank. “Now, as my brother is dead, the onus is on me to show that I am alive and my brother is Raghu and not Shivanna, as he passed himself off all these years,” says a distraught Shivanna.

In 2012, after his appeals to the taluk office to clear the confusion got him no response, he filed a private criminal complaint in a local court. “I was worried after he died on 6 July 2011, so I went to court asking for relief under IPC sections 167, 177, 420, read with 34 [all related to assuming an identity, fraud, cheating and conspiracy].” The court has asked that an officer ranked no lower than Deputy Superintendent of Police file a report.

Officials in the DSP’s office had told Shivanna that the matter would be looked into only after the Karnataka polls in May this year. But even several weeks after the election, he has not been called for clarifications. When asked, police officials promised to look into the matter “within the next few days’’ as ‘sahebru’—a reverential Kannada term for a high-ranking officer—was busy with other police matters in the wake of the change in government.

Meanwhile, original documents showing Raghu up as a fraud, painstakingly collected by Shivanna, have been tendered in court. Shivanna shows us copies of the documents, starting with Raghu’s marriage invitation card, which reads ‘GS Raghu weds BK Mangala’.

He also has a bunch of inland letters written by Raghu, while in service, to his aunt, then the only literate member of the family. The letters are signed as ‘Raghu’. In some of the letters, in the space for the sender’s name and address, there is no name but only his military service number: 138780068KP. Shivanna also possesses a money-order receipt from a time that Raghu sent Rs 45 to the same aunt in his own name.

Raghu and Shivanna were educated only up to seventh class. The year of birth on Raghu’s school certificate is 1958; on Shivanna’s, it is 1961.

Interestingly, not once has Raghu admitted, verbally or in writing, that he assumed his younger brother GS Shivanna’s identity. It seems he sought to keep the issues separate.

“He was known as Raghu to the family and villagers, and Shivanna to the outside world where he was employed. He managed to assume two identities and shuffled with ease between the two,” says another villager, Lance Naik (retired) GL Subramani, who was also a driver in the ASC.

Shivanna’s wife, Siddagangamma, an anganwadi worker in the village, points out an interesting fact: “If Raghu had died in the village itself, as an anganwadi worker, I would have had to issue his death certificate, which would have been entered as ‘GS Raghu’ and not ‘GS Shivanna’. But, as he died in Command Hospital, Bangalore, his death certificate has been [issued] in the name he assumed when he joined the Army. If he had died in the village, his wife could not have claimed pensions from both the military and SBM, as the name on the death certificate would have been different.”

She is fed up of the confusion. “Tomorrow, to suit her purposes, Mangalamma may claim my husband to be the dead person, or she may even claim that Shivanna had two wives,” Siddagangamma fears.

Locals who support Shivanna allege the deceased brother’s wife played a trick by not printing a card to send friends and relatives, as is the usual practice to observe the 11th day after a person’s death. The body, too, has been interred in their own six-acre agricultural plot, and the grave remains unmarked. “If she had printed the name ‘Raghu’ on the card, it would have proved that his real name was Raghu and that ‘Shivanna’ was an assumed name. If she had printed the name as ‘Shivanna’, then she would have had to answer to other villagers. For the same reason, the grave too remains unmarked,” says Subramani.

Efforts to speak to Mangalamma, also known as Mangala, came to nought, as the lady refused to open the door. She stood behind a window and looked out at us all the while we were speaking to Shivanna. A framed photograph hanging on a wall inside her house, featuring Raghu in his Army uniform, can be seen if the window is fully open. Having been made a party to the fraud, she was clearly too uncomfortable to answer these questions. But police say they will question her too.

Mangalamma went a step further to cement her husband’s name as GS Shivanna by getting a certificate from the local gram panchayat saying that a person called ‘GS Shivanna’ who resided in Gopalapura village had passed away, upon which she got some villagers to sign as witnesses. This rattled Shivanna so much that he makes it a point to look at his reflection in the mirror when he wakes up in the morning to convince himself he is alive.

To perpetuate the impersonation, villagers say Mangalamma needs a photo ID with her picture and name that records the name of her husband as ‘GS Shivanna’. For this, she has applied for an Aadhaar card. This will help her sell any property as late Shivanna’s wife. As of now, villagers say, in order to receive the pensions, she need not show anything other than her husband’s death certificate—which she has got.

Shivanna’s son Mahesh is confused with the mismatch in documents and wants his father’s name to be cleared under the law, as the confusion will hamper his life in the future. “I don’t know what turn the controversy will take. The court should clearly restore my father’s identity. That will clear up a lot of things and make our lives easier,” says Mahesh, a class 12 student.

The two families are not on talking terms, and even the oldest brother, Rangappa, has sided with Raghu’s family, Shivanna claims. Rangappa walked away as soon as we arrived in the village, to avoid any questions, but has told villagers that Mangalamma should be left in peace as she has already lost her husband and bears the burden of bringing up two teenage daughters. Other villagers tell us he said it would not make a difference if she knows whether her husband’s real name is Shivanna or Raghu, as she has his service records and also a death certificate.

Shivanna has also complained to the taluk officer that the Nellikere mandal secretary, Kodandaramaiah, issued, on government stationery, a death acknowledgement under a false name, asking other villagers to sign as witnesses. “I have gotten him suspended for being party to forgery, as he knows I am Shivanna and I am very much alive. How can he issue a certificate that can be used as a document for succession so carelessly? He also knows my wife is an anganwadi worker and that her husband Shivanna [as I speak] is alive. He has no business issuing such a certificate.”

The complications within complications make one’s head spin. It is bizarre that a simple attempt to meet the age requirement for joining the Army could lead to such a complex and long-running fraud. When asked why he was going to such great lengths to teach his dead brother and his family a lesson, Shivanna says he had thought about the matter for many weeks and concluded that it was an elaborate conspiracy on the part of his brother’s family.

“As long as I am alive, I can prove that I am Shivanna. If I die, there is a possibility that Mangalamma will come forth to claim she is my wife and deprive my family of their [property] share. Having seen her actions so far, I think she is capable of going to any extent.”

About The Author

Anil Budur Lulla