Dowry & desertion: Parliamentary panel seeks ways to tackle fraudulent marriages with NRIs

Activists classify frauds into three broad categories. One frequent complaint is about instances in which an NRI man marries in India for dowry and then returns abroad, after which the bride never sees him again. In other cases, the bride does go abroad but finds the groom already married, or she is harassed and in some cases becomes a victim of trafficking. In the third kind of fraud, it’s the bride who marries an NRI only for a visa and annuls the marriage once abroad.

“NRI grooms have made a mockery of Indian girls and the institution of marriage,” says a petition by the NGO Lights Research Foundation, endorsed by then BJP MP Avinash Khanna, and forwarded to the panel by Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari.

“The Holiday Bride, a deserted woman, can’t aspire anything more than barren sympathy of people in our society…” says the petition. “A quick engagement, followed by a massive wedding, a huge dowry and a honeymoon, after which the NRI husband flies out of India while the wife waits for her visa… Over 20,000 brides have not seen their husbands after their honeymoon.”

“We have called officials of the home ministry and the women and child development secretary and asked them what steps they are taking to check this practice,” said the panel’s chairman, Bhubaneswar Kalita. Officials of the home and law ministries were called Friday. “Before that, the panel called officials of the external affairs ministry and the National Commission for Women. The NCW has talked to some state governments, we want to know what these states are doing about it,” said Kalita, calling for a dedicated cell in the external affairs ministry to handle such cases.

Activist Sulagna Chattopadhyay, who heads the NGO, too deposed before the panel. “People of Indian origin perpetuating the crime are rarely tried in Indian or destination country courts, with the cases/complaints going unreported,” she said. “The status of the marriage is rarely ascertained by India… Although the WCD ministry does put out dos and don’ts for marriages with NRIs, families find it difficult to ascertain the information provided by the groom. The Indian government can step in and provide a tool to check the credentials of the groom-to-be.”

“In some genuine marriages, incidents of domestic violence are reported abroad. Since this is on foreign soil, our agencies fail to act,” said Khanna, the former MP.

Instances of fraudulent marriages have been reported mostly from Punjab (25,000 cases according to Chattopadhyay) and Haryana. Many families from Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, too, have been victims.

“Such cases are rampant even in Goa. Once they leave the country, catching them and bringing them here is hard,” said Shantaram Naik, a Congress member in the panel, alleging the government is “not paying attention” to the problem.

Several ministries — external affairs, law, overseas Indian affairs, WCD — and the NCW have raised the problem at various forums over the years. The parliamentary committee on empowerment of women in the previous Lok Sabha discussed “Plight of Indian women deserted by NRI husbands” and suggested a mechanism to deal with the issue. In 2008, a meeting of the ministries concerned, NCW and National Human Rights Commission decided that NCW would be the coordinating agency to process complaints of Indian women deserted by their Indian husbands abroad; the NCW has since 2009 been taking up victims’ cases with missions abroad.