Global Courant
Like many other women in the state of Punjab, long a center of emigration from India, Sharndeep Kaur aspired to marry an Indian working abroad and follow him to a more prosperous life abroad.
On January 13, 2014, she thought her dream had come true. That day, in a Sikh temple, she married Harjinder Singh, who had just returned from Italy, and moved in with his family.
But after a few days, her in-laws started demanding about $10,000 so that her husband could settle in Canada. When she failed to secure the money, they starved her and beat her, according to a police complaint that led to no charges.
Eight weeks after the wedding, her husband returned to his dairy farm in Italy. Mrs. Kaur never saw him again. “Days turned into weeks and then months,” she said recently at her home in Fateh Nangal village. “And my eyes kept looking for him.”
Mrs. Kaur is far from alone in her misery. According to government officials and activists, tens of thousands of Indian women have been abandoned by husbands working abroad, leaving many of them confined to their in-laws’ homes for decades in accordance with local social customs.
Some women left behind by husbands are victims of the unfulfilled promises of changing circumstances. Others, however, have fallen victim to outright deception, their families defrauded of dowries, honeymoon expenses and visa payments.
Few specific remedies are available to women whose husbands have fled, and it can be difficult to pursue the men under more general laws when they are abroad. But eight women have petitioned India’s Supreme Court in an effort to pressure the government into making policies to address what they called a widespread problem.
A former judge who headed a commission investigating the issue in Punjab said there were 30,000 such cases in that state alone.
Although Punjab, India’s only Sikh-majority state, is home to some of the country’s richest agricultural lands, it has long struggled with unemployment and drug abuse. Billboards advertising English-language training centers and visa consultants are evidence of an exodus to foreign countries. Young men often force older relatives to sell land so they can emigrate.
On a recent afternoon, at a roundabout in Kotli, a village surrounded by paddy and sugar cane fields, a dozen elderly men sat under a tree discussing the problems of ailing farmers: low incomes, mountains of debt and, in some cases, suicide.
“That’s why everyone wants to fly out of Punjab to fulfill their dollar dream,” says Satnam Singh, 65, a retired school teacher, “and these women are partly a result of those ambitions.”
He said some husbands wanted to keep their promise to take their wives abroad, but unforeseen events or strict visa regulations prevented them from doing so.
Activists and experts described a more disturbing pattern, which also emerged in interviews with 12 women.
The situation, they said, often plays out like this: parents arrange for their daughter to be married off to a returning Indian. They pay a dowry, a practice long banned in India but still common. A lavish wedding ensues, with days of food and alcohol and dancing to Punjabi music. Then comes a honeymoon, also paid for by the bride’s family.
The man flies away and the woman waits for a visa while living with her in-laws. The in-laws demand money to secure the visa, but it never arrives. The woman, who is often illiterate, is under constant surveillance to control her and harm her psychologically.
For Mrs. Kaur, who fled her in-laws’ house after five months, it was “like living in a dark dungeon.”
Other dangers may also lurk. Some women “complain that they are being sexually exploited by other members of their husband’s family because they have nowhere else to go,” said Rakesh Kumar Garg, the retired judge who until recently headed the state commission on the matter.
In a number of cases, men have used dowry money to pay immigration agents to land in wealthy countries such as Canada, where Sikhs make up about 2 percent of the population.
“The boys come, they enjoy themselves, and they leave with the dowry money,” Mr. Garg said. “Then they get married again abroad for citizenship. It’s just betrayal.”
Women left behind can be found all over Punjab – a sign that the desperation to leave outweighs the many cautionary tales.
“Someone lives here,” said Kulwinder Kaur, who said she herself was lured into marriage in 1999, pointing from her patio to a door on the right side of her home. “Someone else lives there,” she continued, pointing to a bamboo gateway to the left of her house.
After her marriage, Mrs. Kaur, who is not related to Sharndeep Kaur, lived with her husband at his parents’ house in Kotli for nine months. He worked as a carpenter before leaving for Canada without telling her. She continues to live with her in-laws 24 years after her marriage, both of whom are bedridden.
“I’m like a servant in his house,” she said.
On a recent clear morning, Satwinder Kaur Satti, head of Abbnhi, a support group for left-behind women, was talking to visitors at her home in Ludhiana when her phone rang.
“Can you please help me?” a woman cried on the phone after she said she had been beaten by her mother-in-law for not arranging money for her foreign son.
At the woman’s home, Ms. Satti, who also said she was a victim of a fraudulent marriage, encouraged her to report it to the police, but the woman wanted to wait a few months. “Your husband will never take you out, remember this,” Mrs. Satti told her. “File a police case or die while you wait.”
Some women fight to have their husbands’ passports confiscated. Ravneet Khural, an English tutor, sends email reminders to the authorities every week requesting the cancellation of the passport of her husband, Harpreet Singh Dhiman.
This is possible under a federal law that can be used to revoke the passports of Indians who have gone abroad and left their wives behind if the husbands repeatedly refuse to appear before judges.
Mr. Dhiman’s parents moved to Canada on a business visa after Ms. Khural’s marriage in 2015. After living in different countries and occasionally traveling home to see relatives and his wife, Mr. Dhiman joined his parents in Canada in 2021.
Ms. Khural said she paid about $8,000 to her in-laws for paperwork and a visa. Her father-in-law, Kesar Singh, denied the allegation.
“Let her prove it,” said Mr. Singh over the phone, adding that his son had filed for divorce before leaving India as the couple did not get along. Ms. Khural said she was notified of the divorce filing by a lawyer at the end of last month. Women rarely file for divorce themselves in such cases, for cultural and financial reasons.
Ms. Khural filed a complaint with the police, accusing her husband of domestic violence – the police often investigate such charges due to the lack of specific laws against fleeing spouses – and of keeping her under camera surveillance. The case, like most in India, is progressing slowly.
“I want to teach him a lesson,” she said, “so that he will forever remember what he did to me.”
Harjinder Singh, the dairy farmer in Italy who is married to Ms Kaur, said he too faced a domestic violence case after his wife filed a complaint. In a telephone interview, he refused to give his side of the story or defend his abandonment of his wife. “I have nothing to add,” said Mr. Singh.
Recently, Mrs. Kaur was standing on her parents’ patio when a man in a white shirt walked down a path in the middle of the cornfields behind the house.
“I wish it was him,” she said, her voice falling to a hush. “But I know he will never come back.”
