Seated in the regional passport office in Jalandhar, aprovincial city at the heart of India's breadbasket, 39-year-old Sarabjit Kaurtells a harrowing story.
For more than a decade, she has endured a miserable shammarriage. Soon after she married, her husband fled to the UK. To force herparents to pay an illegal dowry, her in-laws have allegedly beaten her, forcedher to do menial chores, denied her food, and cut off the electricity to herroom.
At first, Kaur's in-laws refused to acknowledge the birth oftheir granddaughter at all. Today, having nominally disowned their son, theyforce Kaur and her daughter, now 10, to live as unwelcome guests in a tinyroom, sequestered from the rest of the house.
“I'm not allowed to put my clothes on the wire for drying,”Kaur said. “I'm not allowed to use the water pump. My daughter is not allowedinside the garden for cycling. I'm not allowed to wash my clothes in thewashing machine ” which has been given by my parents!”
Kaur is one of thousands of women in Punjab who have fallenvictim to such marriage scams.
Armed with a passport and a plane ticket, unscrupulous menand their families exploit the value of a green card or foreign work permit toextort exorbitant dowries from their brides. They marry and then flee.
They may take on second wives to obtain a virtual slave. Orthey may simply make a trip to India for a so-called “holiday marriage” ”complete with a big party, lavish gifts, and a week of free sex.
According to India's National Commission for Women, as manyas 20,000 brides have not even seen their husbands since their supposedhoneymoon.
Recently, however, these women have received a lifeline froman unlikely hero: Passport officer Parneet Singh.
Using an obscure footnote in Indian law, Singh has beguncanceling the passports of runaway husbands ” forcing them to face the music orgo into hiding abroad as illegal aliens. And it's already working.
“We have been able to solve about 60 or 70 cases with thisexperiment,” said Singh.
For decades, the Doaba region of the Punjab ” the fertilelands between the Beas and Sutlej rivers ” has been known for offering itsdaughters in marriage to “non-resident Indians” or “NRIs” working in Canada,the UK and the US. Fraud seems nearly as common as love in these arrangedunions.
