In a concerted effort to stop a social scourge that has left over 30,000 women desperate and looking for their husbands, a government team in the town of Jalandhar, Punjab has begun impounding the passports of the so-called Non-Resident Indian (NRI) runaway bridegrooms.
The Jalandhar Passport Office’s Women’s Grievance Section (WGS) has hit the ground running, impounding passports of 11 NRI men who deserted their brides soon after marriage and returned to foreign shores, local media said.
The WGS, which was set up last month, has also issued show-cause notices to 40 other NRI grooms, 19 of whom are proclaimed offenders.
An official said that within a month of setting up the WGS, they had received 500 calls from UK, USA, Canada, Europe, China, Australia etc. Also, 200 people had visited the passport office to complain. Jalandhar had the maximum cases against NRI grooms, followed by Hoshiarpur. India’s abandoned brides are victims of cultural fraud which is perpetuated by greed and fuelled by a manic desire to go overseas.
Lured by the promise of large dowries, prospective grooms frequently breeze in every year from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe marry, then rush back home with the spoils, leaving behind what have become known as “abandoned brides”.
Today, across India, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young women live to regret marriages that have left them alone, miserable and consumed with shame.
According to Balwant Singh Ramoowalia of the the Lok Bhalai party, a small political organisation in Punjab, over 22,000 abandoned brides have registered criminal cases against their NRI (Non-Resident Indian) grooms in Punjab alone.
The South Asian Post and its sister papers were among the first newspapers in Canada to highlight and investigate this social menace five years ago.
A 2007 report by the Punjab University stated that about 25,000 abandoned women in Punjab alone faced an uphill battle against a legal system which provides little hope of justice.
It suggested the Indian government should stamp the marital status of NRIs in their passports and bring in new laws to protect vulnerable women.
With an estimated 30,000 brides being abandoned every year, usually by husbands living overseas, India’s Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs also recommends that families hire private detectives to vet suitors and avoid being conned into giving away dowries, which are officially outlawed but are still common among the wealthy.
The ministry estimates that hundreds of thousands of brides are lied to or misled each year.
While arranged marriages between Indo-Canadians and Indian nationals have a time-honoured and successful history, police in the state of Punjab, from which 75 per cent of B.C.’s Indo-Canadian population originates, say half of these marriages today are frauds.
Jalandhar, where the crackdown has begun is in Punjab’s Doaba region where this phenomenon–some have likened to organized crime – occurs at an alarming rate. Of the nearly 30,000 women deserted by NRI husbands and roughly 15,000 of them belong to the Doaba region.
Jalandhar Passport officer Parneet Singh told reporters that the passports of those grooms were impounded who did not respond to the show-cause notices sent to them within 15 days. He said a “Women’s Adalat” would be organised on International Women’s Day (March 8) to take up cases of desertion and facilitate spot issuance of passports.
In one case, an NRI man’s passport was impounded even before the show-cause notice was issued because he was set to fly abroad when the complaint against him was received. Complainant Parveen Bhatti, talking to The Indian Express, revealed that her husband Pradeep Singh had deserted her just after her marriage in 2008 and he was about to fly abroad after showing himself as unmarried, but she made a complaint to the passport officer, who acted immediately and impounded Pradeep’s passport just a few hours before the flight on February 22.
Saravjit Kaur, who married UK-based Gurpreet Singh Bal in 2002, was deserted in 2003. “He got married twice but couldn’t escape from the passport office net,” she said. Similarly, the passport of US-based Vishal Sharma has been impounded for deserting his wife Nandini Sharma of Amritsar.
The men whose passports are impounded will have to settle their matrimonial disputes for restoration of their passports.
Passport Officer Parneet Singh said that all the cases in which passports were impounded involved matrimonial fraud. Singh said 105 cases have been taken up so far while details of the other cases are being collected. “The police should have informed the passport office about the 19 POs but that did not happen,” he said.
He said he had discussed with the commissioner of Jalandhar division mandating inclusion of the spouse’s name in a passport at the time of registering a marriage. The Commissioner had further instructed the DC offices to initiate this procedure, he said.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs is also looking to issue dual passport to NRI brides to secure their safe passage back home in case they are abused and harassed by their husbands overseas.
“The National Commission of Women is preparing a report on NRI cases and I am going to request the External Affairs Ministry to issue the passports to women getting married to NRIs,” said Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath
She said the woman “can take one passport with her and depending on the ministry’s stand, the other can be kept in the possession of her family back home or the Indian embassy abroad”.
She also said that registering such marriages at religious places like gurdwara and temples was essential to keep records of such marriages.
“Once the girl is married and sent abroad, we have no control over how to protect her if she is victimised,” she said.
She also said the Indian embassy abroad should also register such marriages.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada is also planning to tighten policies to prevent people from gaining permanent residency through marriage fraud.
Immigration minister Jason Kenney is consulting with different groups and looking at how the law might be structured to deal with this kind of a situation.
------ Related Story : ----------------------
Broken Bangles: India's Abandoned Bridesby RAHUL BEDI
Jaswant Kaur is one of tens of thousands of 'holiday wives' spread across India who, after years of abandonment, still awaits her husband's return from Britain.
A fortnight after their lavish wedding in the border district of Gurdaspur, Karamjit Singh - considered a prize 'catch' for most Indian parents wanting their daughters married as he was an Indian settled abroad - left for London.
He promised his excited 21-year-old bride, who had never left her small town, that he would send her immigration papers within weeks to enable her to join him.
The groom and his family also carried away 700,000 rupees ($21,867.73) in dowry and gold ornaments which the bride's parents had raised by mortgaging their small plot of land and house.
Eleven years later, Jaswant Kaur still waits for news from her husband.
"We now learn that he already had a wife and two children in London when we were married" Jaswant said.
"For him I was nothing but a sexual dalliance and a source of gratification for his greed in the dowry. Along with my family, I stand disgraced socially as an abandoned bride. I have no recourse to any redress whatsoever."
Jaswant, however, is one of the luckier ones.
Karamjit Kaur from nearby Jalandar, 400 km north of New Delhi, was not as fortunate. Her husband Raghbir Singh left her with his parents and returned to his job in Dubai in December 2002 after carrying away the dowry he and his family had mandated on her as a prerequisite to the marriage.
Three months later, Karamjit's in-laws attempted to kill her by setting her alight when her parents were unable to pay an additional dowry, a mode of bride murder favoured by thousands of greedy Indian husbands and their families.
Her parents lodged a police case, but were harassed in turn.
"All the police were interested in was making money out of our misery. They are doing nothing to investigate Raghbir Singh and his parents," she said.
"Lust, dowry and the lure of settling abroad are responsible for the plight of thousands of these holiday wives across Punjab" said Daljit Kaur, a lawyer and activist.
There was no legislation to safeguard them from being duped and dumped by Indian grooms mostly from the West, particularly Britain and North America and the Gulf Sheikhdoms.
Some men even married three or four times, managing to flee safely each time because local police favoured the boys' families. In some instances, police took five to six years to even register a formal complaint.
Since 2002, only a small fraction of the ten of thousands of these female victims to be found across India, had managed to lodge cases. But police officials in Chandigarh privately conceded that such cases are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate because once the man has left the country, extradition was given little or no priority.
There have also been several cases of overseas Indian grooms taking their wives back, insuring them for large sums and then bringing them back home to have them murdered.
India's tortuously slow and corrupt legal and police investigation structure was insurance against them being caught, although since the mid 1990s a handful of convictions had occurred but under pressure from overseas authorities.
India's intensely patriarchal social structure has a distinct gender bias against women, widely considered an economic liability as they need to be married off after payment of substantial dowries.
Abandoned brides become even more of a drain on their families.
"A woman who has been abandoned by her non-resident husband and returns to her parents' home is not welcome," said Balwant Singh Ramoowalia, head of the People's Welfare Society.
The children from such unions face even greater prejudice.
"Though social awareness programmes have been launched to educate people against this evil and the government lobbied to adopt more stringent laws, progress has been incremental," lawyer/activist Daljit Kaur said.
http://www.sikhchic.com/current_events/broken_bangles_indias_abandoned_brides