No Body, No Certificate, No Relief: Manipur's 49 Missing and the Ethics of Bending a Sound Rule

A Sound Rule, 49 Families and the Officer Who Has to Choose

You are a Home Department officer in Imphal. Your table holds 49 files. Each is a person who has been missing since the violence of May 3, 2023. Each family has searched, waited and filed reports. Each file ends the same way. **Without a death certificate and autopsy report, the Central assistance scheme cannot pay.

Without a body, there is no death certificate. And the law will not presume death until seven years have passed.** Families of people confirmed dead in the same conflict have received support. These 49 families are in the same grief, often with the same lost income, but they have received nothing, because their relative's death cannot be proved.

Why the

easy answer is too easy The easy answer is to pay them because they are suffering. But the rule exists for real reasons.

• It protects against fraud. Conflicts and disasters produce false claims. A death-certificate requirement is how the state makes sure public money reaches real victims.
• It protects the missing person. Declaring someone dead too early can erase their legal existence, affecting property, marriage and identity, if they are in fact alive.
• It protects against precedent. Once one category is exempted, others will reasonably ask why they cannot be too. So you are weighing public money, legal certainty and fairness to future claimants against a family's present grief. Both sides have real moral weight.

Applying the

frameworks to this file A Kantian reading asks what the rule is for. The documentation requirement exists to make sure relief reaches genuine victims. Using it to deny relief to people who are verifiably genuine victims defeats the reason the rule exists.

Obeying it to the letter here betrays its purpose. A Rawlsian reading asks you to choose a policy without knowing which family you would be. You would not choose a system that supports the confirmed bereaved but leaves the unconfirmed waiting seven years in the same poverty.

The consequentialist concern about precedent is real. It is answered by designing the exception as a set of criteria that apply to anyone who meets them, rather than as a one-off favour.

The resolution:

compassion with accountability built in Approve the relief, as Manipur's Cabinet did, but build the safeguards into the approval itself:

• Check each case: require an FIR or police verification that the person is linked to the conflict and has been missing since then.
• Publish the list and invite objections: publishing names means a fraudulent claim would be exposed publicly.
• Frame it as assistance, not a declaration of death: this keeps the family's hope and the missing person's legal status, intact.
• Keep the search going: the payment is not the end of the state's effort to find the person. The cost has to be acknowledged. Some public money may reach a family whose relative later turns up alive and other groups will ask for similar treatment. That risk is worth accepting.

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The civil servant's lesson: a rule against fraud should screen out false claims, not keep out genuine victims. When it starts doing the second, the official's job is to redesign the safeguard, not to apply it more strictly.