When wedding vows turn to woes

DESERTED: The British legal system has devised a plan to help ill-treated NRI brides in UK.

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London: The foreign fairy tale ended for Gursharan Kaur just a few months after her marriage to an NRI in Britain. Her husband was cold and abusive and his family treated her like a slave.

At 18, Gursharan was lonely, a victim of domestic violence and worse still pregnant with a girl child - whom she later named Manmeet.

But that was not all. When Manmeet was just 4 months old, Gursharan was told that her father had taken ill and was packed off to India with her mother-in-law in tow.

Manmeet was kept back in Britain. After some time in India, her mother-in-law went back to Britain - with Gursharan's passport leaving the distraught girl in India.

"At first I wanted to live in England. It was like a dream and the family was also nice. But after three or four months their behaviour completely changed. When When I spoke to my mother-in-law, she told me that she had come to India to leave me here. When I asked her for my passport, she started to abuse me," says Gursharan.

Gursharan's case is not the only one. In 1997, Manjit moved to England on a six-month fiancee visa. Her marriage seemed over even before her visa expired.

Her husband had no intentions of renewing her visa and overnight she became an illegal immigrant.

"They got me arrested twice saying that I was an illegal immigrant. I was two months pregnant at that time," says Manjit.

Fortunately for women like Gursharan and Manjit, the British legal system has devised a rescue plan.

When women like them come to the Newham Asian Women's Project - a charity in east London, they get legal advice and can take action then.

Gursharan and Manjit decided to take their husbands to court.

After a year-and-a-half of struggling, Gursharan has finally got the custody of two-year-old Manmeet and is expecting her residency in January.

Manjit, meanwhile, lives in a refuge with her seven-year-old son. Her application for residency is with the Home Office. Both women are determined to get jobs and be single mothers in this country for going back home is not an option.

The main difficulty that women like Gursharan and Manjit - abandoned by their NRI husbands - face is that they cannot count on any help from Indian laws.

They have to fight these long legal battles in their foreign country, which isn't easy given that they are isolated, the costs are exorbitant and often there is a language barrier.

Activists, however, say that Indian authorities can help in providing information and indeed monitoring cases of NRI marriages.

These are just two stories, of two women who had the courage to stand up and fight, but there are many more stories out there - where wedding bells turned into echoes of despair. And foreign dreams turned into nightmares.

(With inputs from Nilanjana Bose)