Jaswant Singh Gandam
PHAGWARA/JALANDHAR: Activists of newly floated body of deserted wives of NRI husbands ‘Ab Nahi-Abandoned Wives by NRI Husbands International Sanstha’ held a protest in Jalandhar to highlight their miserable plight and demand action against ditching NRI husbands.
Led by their President Satwinder Kaur Sati, the activists took out a protest march, raising slogans against their NRI husbands, sporting banners with different slogans, including “Asi aj vi sati ho rahiyan/Chita da andaz badal giya’(We are still being subject to ‘sati’(a practice of yore under which widow was forced to burn alive in the pyre of her husband) but the mode of the pyre had changed).
The protesters included victims of domestic violence.
Sati claimed that there were as many as 32,000 victim wives deserted by NRI husbands. ‘The number of domestic violence victims was alarmingly astronomical as it was virtually a ‘ghar ghar ki kahani’ (almost a tale of every household), she said.
She declared that all the deserted victims and their families would boycott 2019 Lok Sabha polls as no party had bothered to contact them.
“The victims have been bundled out of their houses, properties were willed in the names of other family members by wily in-laws in order to deprive them of their legal right of share in the property, their ditching husbands were enjoying live-in relations with other ladies abroad while the legally-wedded wives were running from pillar to post in search of justice,” she rued.
She alleged that in many cases even FIRs were not being registered. Several truant husbands were declared proclaimed offenders (POs) but nothing was being done to repatriate them.
Many protesters narrated their tales of woes with tears in their eyes.
Their husbands, accused of what is being dubbed as holiday marriages, had left them a few years after the marriage and were having living-in relationships with other women.
They have been ousted of their houses and they are either themselves fending for their children or getting support from their parents for it.
Most of these betraying men are settled mainly in Canada, USA, UK, Australia, Italy, Kuwait, Gulf and other countries.
Some of these women have managed to impound the passports of their husbands and have asked Union minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi to get their husbands deported. Sati said they were sending a signed representation to Lok Sabha Speaker for demanding criminal provision against live-in relations by husbands.
