Chandigarh, India - In a pink-walled room
of a government office at the foot of the Himalayas, Indian
women spend their days cancelling the passports of runaway
husbands.
Midday on a Monday, the father of a woman who married a
merchant marine is explaining how the husband lied about being
single and failed to disclose the fact that he had a child and a
warrant for his arrest. The case, says worker Amritpal Kaur,
should qualify for immediate impoundment of the man's passport.
Kaur isn't your usual Indian bureaucrat. She isn't a
government employee at all. She and the other women who work in
the passport office are abandoned wives, volunteering their
hours at the office to help women like them.
Sibash Kabiraj, regional passport chief in the city of
Chandigarh, says it all began when the wives started coming to
him and pleading for help.
A lifelong civil servant with a taste for the fine print,
Kabiraj realized Indian law would allow him to suspend – and
even cancel – the passports of overseas Indian men who had
misled their wives. The Passport Authority requires approval
from the central government to take away a passport but can do
so if the holder lies or withholds information, or if there is a
warrant or court summons, among other reasons.
Satwinder Kaur, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, talks on the phone as she travels to a court hearing in Jagraon, Punjab. Kaur says her neighbours and even relatives call her banj, or "rotten womb,". Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
But there was a problem in this country notorious for its
bureaucracy. "One suspension of a passport, it requires a lot of
paperwork," he says.
Not one to be stopped, he explained passport law to the
women, gave them a room with a computer, printer and fax
machine, and told them if they would do the paperwork, he would
sign it.
It's the women's best way of seeking justice from their
far-away husbands, he says.
Satwinder Kaur, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, talks on her mobile phone inside a cab, while heading to Nawanshahr from Toosa, south of Ludhiana in Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
In the past year and a half, the women have managed to
suspend more than 400 passports and revoke 67 others, Kabiraj
says. In all, more than 5,000 women have filed abandonment
complaints with India's Ministry of External Affairs.
The women in his office, Kabiraj says, "have created terror"
in several foreign countries.
Indians living abroad aren't an easy group to take issue
with.
They sent $79 billion in remittances to India in 2018, the
most of any country in the world, according to World Bank data.
They're expected to send $82.2 billion in 2019.
Satwinder Kaur who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, shows photos from her wedding album at her house in the village of Toosa, south of Ludhiana, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
They pay for new roads and the school fees of children whose
families are too poor to pay themselves. They host community
feasts. They send back pictures from Australia's beaches, return
for visits with twangy English and iPhones.
They're known as non-resident Indians, or NRIs. Prime
Minister Narendra Modi has called NRIs the "brand ambassadors of
India". But Indian government policy think tank Niti Aayog
nicknamed them "non-reliable Indian grooms".
The wives say many of the men demand – and often get – tens
of thousands of dollars in dowry, despite the ancient practice
being illegal. The husbands can use that money to establish
themselves overseas and obtain permanent residency or a new
passport, leaving their wives and children behind – and in
limbo.
An abandoned woman has no status, says Shiwali Suman, who
organizes abandoned wives in New Delhi. "Are we divorced,
single, widowed?" she asks. "What are we actually? We are not
able to be categorized."
Satwinder Kaur, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, reads messages on her phone at her house in the village of Toosa, south of Ludhiana, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
The men deny they have done anything wrong, saying they did
their best but were taken advantage of by their wives. One says
his life is "hell" now and he no longer trusts women.
The wives left behind don't see it that way. In recent
months, city and rural women alike have begun staging protests.
One woman at a recent protest in Jalandhar, in Punjab state,
said time was up for the runaway men: "There's a fire erupting
in all of us."
THE VOLUNTEERS
Reena Mehla was 24 when she got married. Five years later,
she says, her husband told her he was going to work extra police
duty shifts elsewhere in India, and instead hired human
smugglers to take him to the United States.
Palwinder Kaur (left) and Satwinder Kaur (right) speak to a woman who says she has been abandoned by her husband, in the village of Toosa, south of Ludhiana, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
Rahul Kumar now lives in the Bronx. Reena wrote to India's
Ministry of External Affairs, the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, searched Facebook, and eventually found him.
She scrolls through dozens of emails she sent to foreign
officials and the letter showing his passport was revoked;
according to the U.S. Justice Department immigration court
hotline, his status in that country is pending. Then she pulls
up one of their wedding pictures and kisses it.
When asked if she still loves him, Reena stretches her arms
and grins. "Too much!"
Even though she has a master's degree in education,
sometimes she seems more like a teenager than a 30-year-old. She
keeps her smartphone in a Minnie Mouse case with floppy ears and
giggles when anyone replies to her exaggerated hellos.
Satwinder Kaur, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, reacts during a court hearing after a judge postponed the trial, as her in-laws got a stay order over the warrant of possession of the house, in the lower court at Jagraon, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
But she had the inner strength to leave her rural home and
move on her own to Chandigarh, the regional capital, to
volunteer in the passport office. She knows she's defying
traditions back home, where married women don't leave the house
without male relatives or have a separate identity.
"Even our soul is not allowed because a husband is
everything. A husband is like God," she says.
She shares her flat with several women, including Amritpal
Kaur. The surname Kaur, a common one in India, means "woman."
Because most of the women in this story go by the name Kaur,
Reuters is using their first names on second reference to ease
confusion.
When Amritpal talks about her marriage, she keeps coming
back to the money she spent on it: She says she forked over
$28,000 on the dowry and wedding; three days after they were
married, she says, her husband told her to get $14,000 more from
her father. Her husband, Kulpreet Singh, said all the money she
had earned working for two years in England also needed to come
to him, she says.
Two weeks after the wedding, he left for Australia. For
months afterward, he told her he had a surprise. She was so
excited she ordered a $3,500 diamond ring for him.
His surprise, she says, was divorce papers.
Baljit Kaur who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, reads a holy scripture at a Gurudwara (a Sikh place of worship) in Fatehgarh Sahib, Sirhind, Punjab. "I never imagined a woman of my age would end up like this," says Kaur who works as an assistant sub-inspector for the Punjab police. "I thought my life would be different". Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
Rahul and Kulpreet did not respond to requests for comment.
Amritpal now shares a rented flat in Chandigarh with Reena and
several other women. As a reminder of their mission, they've
named the computer folder that holds their files "Mission
Shakti", after the divine feminine force in Hindu belief.
"Shakti is women's spiritual power to fight against this,"
Amritpal says. "We don't want any other girls to be victims like
us."
THE ACTIVIST
Every day, women with husband problems pile into Satwinder
Kaur's family courtyard in a village surrounded by mustard
fields that blaze like the sun.
Only a few thousand people live in Toosa, but her
relationships span the globe. She's helping nearly 400 women
who've been abandoned by their men, she says, getting several of
their runaway husbands deported from their adopted countries and
jailed. Every few minutes her phone rings.
Satwinder's own husband left her in 2015. He now lives in
Poland. In Toosa, women don't venture out at night and are
rarely left home alone, even in walled family compounds.
Ekampreet gives rose petals to her mother Sarbjeet Kaur at Kaur's parent's house in Mukerian, Punjab, India. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
Satwinder is slowly breaking through this – and in the
process has become a symbol of a newfound willingness to fight
back against a patriarchal system. She runs a WhatsApp group and
Facebook page, and tells rural Punjabi women what paperwork they
need to cancel their husbands' passports. She also organizes
protests.
In a fierce torrent of Punjabi punctuated with sharp hand
movements, she holds up photographs of fantastically lavish
weddings produced from plastic bags or passed around on mobile
phones and shared on WhatsApp. From Facebook, there are other
pictures: of the husbands' foreign girlfriends and children and
anniversary cakes.
Even for Satwinder, who has filed 11 court cases against her
husband, it's hard to be a middle-aged, childless woman whose
husband has left her. Her ferocity is in constant battle with
her fear.
She sends her husband WhatsApp messages every day. She can
tell he's read every one of them because of the little blue
check marks, but he hasn't replied since January.
A closeup of the dress that Baljit Kaur rented for her wedding is shown in Rajpura, Punjab. "We are like dead bodies walking. We have no place in society. We can't live and we can't even die," said Kaur, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
Neighbours and even relatives call her banj, or "rotten
womb", she says. "In my own house, I was called that."
When she talks about it, her voice gets loud, then so soft
it can barely be heard, and then she starts to cry.
A lecturer and electrical engineer, her husband, Arvinder
Pal Singh, sees it differently. He says he moved to Europe
because of pressure to earn more. He says he tried and failed to
bring Satwinder to Europe on a student visa and says he was
blindsided by problems between his wife and his mother when he
returned home for a visit.
He lost his job and moved twice. He told Satwinder he would
send money again when he had it. Two months later she filed a
case with the police and his father was arrested, he says. He
later got a call from the Indian Embassy saying his passport had
been cancelled. He stopped sending money and filed for divorce,
which didn't go through.
Arvinder says he no longer trusts women and calls himself a
refugee. "I don't have family. At least she is with family. She
is in her home country. I don't have a country. I don't have a
place to stay, and where I'm standing it's already raining
outside," he says. "This is hell."
Sarbjeet Kaur threads the eyebrows of a customer at her house in Gurdaspur, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
He says he would be arrested if he returned to India and
doesn't believe he would get a fair hearing in court. Now
undocumented, he uses human smugglers to move.
THE POLICE OFFICER
Baljit Kaur lives two lives. In the first, she's a
policewoman, composed and authoritative in a pressed uniform and
red lipstick. In the second, she's an aging bride, abandoned by
her husband and sleeping under sheets printed with red hearts.
"I never imagined a woman of my age would end up like this,"
she says. "I thought my life would be different."
Baljit, 42, was one of four siblings born to an army officer
and his wife in Punjab state. She waited for her siblings to
settle, so, at age 39, was late to marry. When pushed, she paid
a large dowry, even though as a cop, she knew such payments were
illegal.
Before the wedding, Baljit says, her fiance, Harmandeep
Singh Sekhon, would call to ask how much cash she would give his
family. After the wedding, she says, her in-laws complained she
hadn't brought as much as her sister-in-law.
Women, who say they have been abandoned by NRI (non-resident Indian) husbands, take part in an organised protest in Jalandhar, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
Soon Baljit understood why she'd been chosen: "I understood
he didn't want me, he only wanted money."
One month and two days after they married, her husband
returned to the United States. He'd lived there before, and
they'd talked about moving there together. A week after he
arrived, she says, he called saying he had no job and needed her
to send money. She refused.
She last spoke to her husband on October 6, 2014. They have
been locked in a legal battle ever since. She has been granted
ownership of their house and has won maintenance costs, but
those have yet to be paid, she says. She has spent more than
$4,000 on lawyers' fees.
"I have a job, I can manage. But what about the girls who
can't?" she says.
Harmandeep did not respond to requests for comment.
Baljit became a cop in 1995. She worked her way up through
training courses and exams and is an assistant sub-inspector at
the Fatehgarh Sahib District headquarters in Punjab. She has a
sunny government flat with a plant-filled terrace and drives
both a scooter and a car.
Her hard-won career makes it even more humiliating that she
was abandoned so publicly – and yet so intimately. As a police
officer, shouldn't she have seen it coming
"Sometimes she was brave," said Harpreet Kaur, a fellow
officer who would pace the police station corridors with Baljit
as she confided her troubles. "Sometimes she would say…that
people would laugh at her because she was a police officer and
this thing happened."
Baljit is spare with the details but admits she contemplated
suicide: once before marriage when her husband was demanding
money, other times after he left her.
Baljit still says she doesn't feel like living. Her mother,
whose imagined grief stopped her from committing suicide before,
died in May. "What else remains?" she asks. "I am alone."
Of abandoned brides like herself, Baljit says: "We are like
dead bodies walking. We have no place in society. We can't live
and we can't even die."
Baljit's fellow officers have rallied around her. At
lunchtime, half a dozen officers lay out newspapers on a desk
and unpack their tiffins for a shared meal. "We are her family,"
Inspector Kuldeepak Sharma says. "She is not alone here."
THE MOTHER
Sarbjeet Kaur's husband stopped sending money for his
daughter's school fees in 2016, with three months left in the
term. Sarbjeet sold her sofa and two cupboards so she could
finish.
Last year, she sold the gold earrings her parents had given
to her daughter – again, for school fees, this time at her new,
cheaper school.
"I'm living a double life," Sarbjeet says, crying as she
explains that she couldn't tell her parents she had sold the
earrings, so she said she had lost them.
Sarbjeet married Daler Singh in 2008. It wasn't until she
was pregnant that he talked of going abroad, she says. Her
brother had gone to Italy, and it was eight years before he came
back for a visit. She said no.
Neelam, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, reacts at an organised protest in Jalandhar, Punjab. Picture: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
He told her: "‘There is nothing here. There are no jobs, no
money. Whatever job you do, you don't make money.'" She
eventually agreed. When her family got angry, she replied that
Singh would never lie to her or leave her.
Singh went to South America first, then Mexico, Sarbjeet
says. She sold her jewellery for almost $5,000 to help him cross
into the United States in late 2010, she says, and borrowed
$3,600 from her parents to help him enter Canada four years
later. She wanted her daughter, Ekampreet, to study in Canada,
so she pawned her cousins', aunts' and friends' jewellery for
$700, too.
He did send money back, but only for his family, she says.
"'Don't worry,' she says he told her, 'my one-month salary will
buy your jewellery back and I'll pay back your parents, too.'"
She shows pictures of him posing beside fancy cars on
Facebook; she knows he was actually working as a gas station
attendant.
In 2015, he asked for a divorce, saying he needed a paper
marriage to a Canadian woman so he could stay while the
government processed his refugee application.
When Sarbjeet confronted the new woman in a series of audio
messages on Facebook Messenger, the other woman said she would
also fight.
"'You have a daughter,' she said. 'I have a son.'"
Sarbjeet's husband, Daler Singh, called her description of
events "fake". He says he was 17 – a minor – when he married
her, and that they have now been separated for a decade. He says
he has given her money and property but didn't give any further
details or respond to specific questions.
Sarbjeet lives in sugar cane country where the chimneys of
brick factories occasionally pierce the fields to puff gray
smoke. Her parents keep cows. She wants better for her daughter,
so offered the new woman a compromise: If Singh would call his
daughter regularly and send $142 a month for her expenses, she
would drop her case and stop trying to cancel his passport.
He did for a while, then he stopped, she says. Now Sarbjeet
worries constantly about money.
Sarbjeet was a beautician before she got married. These days
she stitches salwar kameez and simple dresses on a
pedal-operated machine beside her bed to earn money.
She charges $2 for a dress, which takes her two days to
finish. If there's a rush, she can do it overnight.
The stress has sometimes overwhelmed Sarbjeet.
When Ekampreet was 3, Sarbjeet tried to commit suicide by
drinking rat poison. Five years later, she tried again by
slitting her wrists. She went twice to a hospital in Amritsar
for depression.
Now, she says, she is stronger. In March, Sarbjeet applied
to have Singh's passport impounded. Satwinder, whom she met late
last year, helped. Eventually, the passport office called to say
it was done.
When asked about her father, Ekampreet says only that she
wants to ask him what she did wrong and why he left her.
Shuffling through a stack of pictures, she comes across a
wedding photo of her parents, her mother in a bright red and
gold sari. She quickly buries it in the looked-at pile.