WUNRN
INDIA - LOST BRIDES - ARRANGED
MARRIAGES GONE AWRY
India Brides Left Behind by Overseas
Husbands
November
16, 2009
Sandeep Kaur calls the volume that
holds her 30-page collection of wedding photos a book of lies.
RICK WESTHEAD/TORONTO STAR
Flipping through her wedding album, a
30-page collection of glossy photos with sugary captions such as "Perfect
Match," Sandeep Kaur grimaces as she recalls her wedding last year to a
young man from
There was no problem with the
celebration itself, mind you. There was more than enough mutton, fish and
chicken for several hundred guests.
Kaur's father, a real estate contractor
from the small city of
He also provided gold rings for all of
Luthra's relatives and gold bangles, rings, earrings and necklaces for him and
his parents.
It was a blowout evening with a $90,000
price tag. A year on, Kaur, 24, weeps as she looks at photos of her husband
holding her in his arms.
"This is a book of lies," she
says.
Two weeks after their April 30, 2008,
wedding, Luthra returned to
But Luthra says he is the one who has
been harassed and that Kaur's family only married him to obtain his ancestral
home in Batala, a home now occupied by his 87-year-old grandfather.
"The only thing that family wanted
is our house, money and Canadian immigration," Luthra said from his home
in
Petite with long brown hair and a
pleasant smile, Kaur is among the latest of
Police in
"This has become a huge social
problem," he says, "and people aren't dealing with it. We only see a
fire if it's in our own home."
Typically in these cases, after a dowry
is paid and marriage consummated, the new husbands return to their homes abroad
and in many cases, only bring their wives with them if their in-laws agree to
cough up more money.
That leaves their wives hamstrung since
Indian judges usually refuse to grant women a divorce without their husbands
present for court hearings.
While Luthra says he was granted a
divorce in a Canadian court in September, Kaur says an Indian court has refused
to recognize the dissolution of the marriage.
"You can threaten your husband
that you will file a case, but most laugh and say they will tie it up in the
courts for years," says Varinder Kaur (no relation), 28, whose Canadian
husband left her to return to the Toronto region within days of their January
2006 marriage.
The surge in abandoned bride cases
comes even as women have made remarkable strides in Indian politics and
business.
The country's top politician is
Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi. Several Indian states have female chief
ministers while the CEO of ICICI Bank, one of
The dowry system was officially
outlawed in 1961 and prenatal gender identification is illegal, an attempt to
prevent female foeticide.
But the success of the country's female
leaders seems far removed in the villages and cities of
One morning this week, Sandeep Kaur and
her father, Gurmeet Singh, travelled to Jalandhar to discuss her case with
police and Balwant Singh Ramoowalia, a former Indian cabinet minister who has
been advocating a reform of Indian laws to prevent abandoned bride cases.
In Jalandhar, a haze-enveloped city
crowded with sputtering diesel rickshaws, 20 new cases of abandoned brides are
registered every day, a police inspector said. While firm statistics aren't
available, Canadian-based families are said to be among the worst offenders.
As Sandeep Kaur and 18 other Punjabi
wives gathered in the police station's grassy courtyard – all of them were
abandoned brides – it was difficult at first to follow their conversation. It
became easier when the women began trading stories about the whereabouts of
their Canadian husbands.
"Downsview," says one woman,
above the din of the chatter and a wheezing ceiling fan. "
As Ramoowalia's staff serves a lunch of
lentils and chapati, Minakshi, a 26-year-old who uses just one name, discusses
how her husband in
The two met in October 2007 and were
married just days after Minakshi's father scrabbled together $11,000 for a cash
dowry and another $2,200 to pay for gold rings and bracelets for Chabrotra's
family. By February 2008, Chabrotra had returned to
Minakshi laid out printouts from online
dating Internet sites such as plentyoffish.com. Chabrotra had posted a photo of
himself online under the username "DJSanj The Shark" and listed his
status as single. "Got the title of `most eligible bachelor' at my
workplace," he wrote. "Rest I will tell u later on contact."
"It's not that I want to go to
Despite the wedding photos Minakshi
provides – they show Chabrotra in a white wedding kurta with red, orange and
white garlands around his neck – Chabrotra says the two never married because
Minakshi's family asked his parents for "$100 million."
"There are millions of issues and
I'm not ready to share my bedroom stories with you," Chabrotra says. In a
subsequent email to the Star,
he wrote: "There were issues of her infidelity before marriage and after
engagement and hence the engagement was called off. I believe that is the way
of life and there might be thousands of cases similar to that."
Like Minakshi, Sandeep Kaur was married
to her husband Sahil Luthra within days of their meeting.
Luthra's family, which arrived in
Batala in early April, had lived there years ago before emigrating to
One night, the Luthra family showed up
unannounced for tea and suggested Kaur would be a good match for their son.
They insisted on a fast wedding, Kaur's father Gurmeet Singh recalls.
"He was nice and he was
attractive," he says.
The next day, the families held a
ceremony to exchange rings and within weeks, the couple was preparing for a
wedding and a honeymoon in the mountainous Indian state Himachal Pradesh.
"That's when the abuse started,
when he started demanding that my family give him even more money," Kaur
says, pausing as she looked at a page in her wedding album with the caption,
"I wait all day just hoping for one more minute with you."
Within two weeks, Luthra had returned
to
"It doesn't matter ... I used to
say so many things to her, she used to say so many things with me. You fight
with your wife, right? ... I was angry."
It's not as if there isn't an awareness
over the risk involved with an arranged marriage to a non-resident Indian. The
problems of domestic abuse and abandoned brides – the two often go
hand-in-hand, authorities say – have been well known here since the early
1990s. The troubles of abandoned brides have been recounted in live theatre,
poetry and traditional music and local newspapers here provide extensive
coverage of cases.
"Yes, there are problems and
dangers," says Sukhjeet Kaur Sandhu, 29, whose husband returned to
Sandhu's father, a retired army officer
who worked on the India-Pakistan border, raised $58,000 for a dowry for his
daughter's husband, Jatinder Paul Virk, a 39-year-old truck driver who lives in
Virk insists he married Sandhu in good
faith.
"She only married me to come to
While her wedding soured, Sandhu says
marrying men from overseas is often worth the gamble for young women.
"We know in
It's a compelling and passionate
argument.
Still, some cases here underscore how
complex the abandoned bride crisis has become. There can be greed on both sides
of the ledger.
Gurmit Kaur Sanyha's 43-year-old father
Chand Singh sold his tractor and his 2.4 hectare (six-acre) ancestral farm to
help pay for his daughter's wedding in October 2006. When he struggled to come
up with the money, his friends urged him to beg and borrow.
"They said, `You have worked so
hard for so little and once she goes to
Sanyha's fiancé, introduced to the
family through a priest near their home in
Another woman explains how her family
worked out an intricate arrangement where she was scheduled to marry a Canadian
citizen and in exchange, her uncle's niece in
Local Punjabi newspapers such as Ajit are full of ads
advertising potential arranged marriages. "One Canadian citizen, a Jatt
Sikh boy, 22 years, needs a girl," one such ad says. "Only those
should contact who can arrange a Canadian marital relations to his cousin, 23
years."
Manish Tewari, an Indian member of
parliament representing
"Our people need to be more
vigilant and they need to check credentials extremely carefully before they
enter into these alliances," says Tewari, the ruling Congress Party's
national spokesperson.
Some Indian politicians suggest
"First you'd have to establish
abandonment as a crime in
Tewari says he plans to ask
Whatever changes are made to Indian law
are likely to come too late for Kaur. She concedes there's virtually no chance
that Luthra will return to
According to court documents, Luthra's
father, Raj Kumar, was designated as a "proclaimed offender" on July
17. Arrest warrants were pending for Sahil Luthra and his mother. (Luthra says
the arrest warrants have been stayed pending a Nov. 27 court hearing and that
his family has submitted $34,000 to an Indian court to settle the dowry issue.)
"Who will have us now?" Kaur
asks, glancing at her companions. "We now have a stigma and we are done
for."
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