In a pink-walled room of a government office at the foot of the Himalayas, India...
Women, who say they have been abandoned by their NRI husbands, take part in an organised protest outside the regional passport office in Jalandhar, Punjab, India, March 8, 2019. REUTERS/Anushree FadnavisCHANDIGARH, 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.
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.
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. 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.
She scrolls through dozens of emails she sent to foreign officials and the letter showing his passport was revoked; according to the U.S. Justice Department immigration court hotline, his status in that country is pending.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.Even though she has a master’s degree in education, sometimes she seems more like a teenager than a 30-year-old.
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. 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.
Neighbors and even relatives call her banj, or “rotten womb”, she says. “In my own house, I was called that.” 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.”
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. 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.
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.” “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.
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 jewelry back and I’ll pay back your parents, too.’”
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