Shameful!

Canada Immigration Forum (discussion group)


 
       
Subject: Shameful!
  Runaway Grooms: Indian brides abandoned by expat husbands

BY RUPAM JAIN NAIR IN BILGA, INDIA, AND TAMSIN MCMAHON IN TORONTO, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NATIONAL POST DECEMBER 30, 2010 10:50 AM

A velvet-bound album of wedding photographs and two unused train tickets for her honeymoon are the only remnants of Amanjyot Kaur’s marriage and the dream of a new life in Canada.

One week after the grand wedding ceremony in a small village in the Indian state of Punjab, Ms. Kaur’s husband, who lives in Montreal, returned home, promising to send his new wife documents she needed for a visa. But the papers never arrived and when Ms. Kaur finally managed to get in touch with her husband he refused to acknowledge her.

“I wrote 120 letters, made nearly 500 phone calls to reach him in Canada but nothing moved him,” said Ms. Kaur, 22, who has suffered chronic depression since her wedding two years ago. “I hate myself for loving an insensitive man. He cheated me, and my family,” she said, gesturing to her father who had to sell four acres of farmland to meet the lavish wedding expenses and a dowry in the thousands of dollars.

Ms. Kaur is just one of thousands of brides abandoned in India by expatriate Indians who return to the country for arranged marriages and then flee — taking the dowry money with them.

The Indian wedding season is in full swing and as young Indian men from Canada and other Western countries travel to their ancestral villages to find a wife, they are casting a spotlight on an epidemic of abandoned brides in India.

According to the Lok Bhalai party, a small political organization in Punjab that caters to India’s expatriate community, more than 22,000 abandoned brides have registered criminal cases against their NRI (Non-Resident Indian) grooms. The party’s founder, Balwant Singh Ramoowalia, estimated that in the past 10 years he has helped 1,200 deserted brides track down their husbands. About half of the cases involve Canadians, he said.

“Marriage is the easiest way to make money for these men. They plan their exit from the country as soon as they get the dowry,” he said. “The real number is unknown because many women from conservative backgrounds worry that complaining could bring shame on their families.”

Canada is among the main destinations for so-called “runaway grooms,” along with the United States and Britain, said Amandeep Singh, an immigration and criminal lawyer in Surrey, B.C., who has offices in India. He advertised in India to assist abandoned brides after reading about their plight in 2003 and was inundated with requests.

Fraudulent grooms advertise for brides in newspapers that target poor families desperate to see their daughters married to wealthy foreigners. The men usually go after farmers who have only a few acres of land, which they’ll sell or put up as collateral for high-interest loans in order to pay for a wedding and dowries that sometimes top $60,000, “a huge amount of money for a small peasant farmer,” Mr. Singh said.

“We’re not talking about middle-class or upper-class people that this happens to,” he said. “The majority of the victims are poor and desperate and will forgo the normal investigation that a family would do on the groom’s family out of economic desperation and their need and want to get out of India and out of their economic plight.”

When the grooms disappear, they leave families broke and young women saddled with the social stigma of a failed marriage. “For the individual involved and the families, it’s devastating,” Mr. Singh said.

Dubbed as “holiday brides,” the women are unable to marry again, feel guilty for being a burden on their parents and often hold onto the distant hope that their husbands will change their minds and rescue them.

“But this never happens. The grooms never come back to the village, fearing that they would be arrested or beaten up by the villagers,” said Radha Navin, a bride abandoned by an English-Indian man in 2004. She now runs a tailoring business staffed by abandoned women in Punjab’s capital city, Chandigarh. “Go to any village in Punjab and you will find at least one ‘holiday bride’ living with her parents or forced to depend on relatives for financial handouts,” she said. “The government needs to recognize this massive social problem.”

Stories recount how the groom leaves India and then demands more and more cash from the bride’s family, saying that unless the money is paid he will never collect her. In late 2007, Indian police charged a Surrey, B.C., man with conspiring with a group of hitmen to murder his bride’s father for not paying a $75,000 dowry and earlier this month The Telegraph of Calcutta reported that Minati Khatua, a 27-year-old woman from Rourkela, India, discovered her new husband was actually a woman, who later fled with the dowry of gold, a car and about $400 in cash.

Mr. Ramoowalia has pushed for the Indian government to register the social insurance numbers of expat grooms, seize passports of fraudsters and fast-track criminal trials.

In 2007, the Indian government said it would compensate abandoned brides as much as $1,100 and help families investigate potential foreign grooms. The government set up a special police force in Punjab, a region particularly hard-hit by fake marriages and said it planned to help families pursue alimony cases against foreign grooms.

In May 2009, an Ontario court awarded $4,800 in alimony to an Indian bride, Namita Sureshbhai Patel, who said her Toronto-area husband, Lokesh Ashokbhai Hindocha, left for Canada just nine days after their wedding. The court found Ms. Patel was “emotionally devastated by the failure of the marriage and was unable to work because of depression.” She claimed that she had given Mr. Hindocha her wedding gifts of gold, silver, diamonds and pearls, and that her family had paid for the wedding along with a dowry.

Despite some legal gains for abandoned brides, Ms. Navin said there has been a reluctance among politicians in Punjab to tackle the issue as many of the expatriate grooms involved come from families who provide parties with donations. “Why would a political party want to upset their donors? For some, NRIs marriages are not made in heaven but on the basis of money,” she said.

The Indian government has pressured Canada and other countries to do background checks on Indian residents who apply for visas to India to determine if they’re already married.

But Mr. Singh said the brides can already pursue a groom and his family under Indian laws and that there is little the Canadian government can, or should, be doing to crack down on Canadian men who defraud their overseas brides.

“It’s something that families have to have a responsibility for themselves,” he said. “The government should really stay out of this.”

Agence France-Presse, National Post



[30-12-2010,16:24]
[**.180.238.237]
Sharon
(in reply to: Shameful!)
Shameful indeed. Happy New Year Sharon.
[30-12-2010,21:39]
[***.166.240.141]
DocD
(in reply to: Shameful!)
Pretty mean things! And I thought that Indians are family-oriented folks. I am surprised Punjabis are this bad. Canada embraced these same losers some 2 decades ago pitying them as persecuted folks. But then again, Canada brings a lot of Moslems and then complains if they want to practice Shria or demand that more local folks convert to Islam. Not sure how often the Moslems are into this kind of stuff.
[30-12-2010,23:13]
[***.202.41.254]
Be Happy
(in reply to: Shameful!)
Be Happy

What really gets me is that some posters like you who have no self respect for themselves prove the point of the article by trying to stoop even lower and then rub their hands in glee while sitting in the dark being anonymous.

If you want to say I´m a racist say so. Post your photo, real name, address, telephone number, date of birth drivers license number etc.

If your proud of being a racist and spewing hatred let the authorities find you a tiny room with three meals daily.

Stealing from anyone is wrong but stealing form the less fortunate really bothers me.

Roy
cvimmigration.com


[31-12-2010,07:31]
[***.93.33.92]
Roy
Shameful! (in reply to: Shameful!)
Okay let´s get the truth out. I am a relative of 22 year old Amanjyot, aka Jyoti, who is featured in this article.

First, her husband is not from Montreal but from Richmond, BC.

Second, the groom´s side did not accept ANYTHING for the dowry, not even a gold chain from our side.

Third, Jyoti´s father did not spend one penny on the wedding! the entire wedding was funded by her aunt from Vancouver BC, uncle from New Delhi, and other uncle from California. He sold the 4 acres to buy a brand new tractor for farming.

Fourth, to say she contacted him and wrote him letters? Lies, all lies! It was her HUSBAND who would call her, only to hear Jyoti tell him that she is busy and doesn´t have time to talk to him, and that he should stop bothering her. Jyoti had a boyfriend who together came up with the ´great plan´ of having her marry a foreigner. She would then go overseas, divorce him and apply for her boyfriend to join her in Canada. Her husband and the rest of our family became aware of this only after the wedding had taken place. Jyoti´s husband has previously been married, who was able to get his wife´s visa approved. She told her flight details, but came on a different flight, never to be seen again.
After hearing of Jyoti´s betrayal, what man in his right mind would apply for her to join him???

Jyoti has not only shamed herself but the entire family. Living in Metro Vancouver where the Punjabi community is very tight knit, we are ashamed by Jyoti´s actions. We cannot make eye contact with the groom´s family, who we see at public functions and temples from time to time.

Now you have the real truth to this story.

I am sure there are many women who have truly been abandoned by their husbands, but it makes my blood boil reading Jyoti tarnish her husband´s reputation and make a mockery of our family!

[28-03-2011,03:17]
[**.82.3.201]
Jyoti's family
(in reply to: Shameful!)
you would have been better off to let the story die.
[28-03-2011,07:37]
[**.180.238.237]
Sharon
Reply to the Shameful! posting
Submission Code (SX16973) Copy The Code From The Left found in the brackets
Name
Email
Reply Subject
Reply Message


Canada Immigration | Forever Living Products in Canada