While child marriage has received a lot of attention over the past few decades, in recent news, cases of NRIs and diaspora-inhabiting men traveling back to South Asia for sham marriages have become almost commonplace.
With the sham marriages, men, usually from the UK, marry women from poorer parts of India. They cohabit with them for a few weeks or months (enough to consummate the marriage) and then leave abruptly with promises of sending for their new wives soon. These women often receive no contact from their husbands or are visited maybe a few times more over the following years, usually for sexual purposes.
Holiday brides are usually coerced or forced into these marriages, leaving them very little support from their family.
“In hindsight, it was like being a prostitute you take along and have a good time with and then leave behind,” said Suman, a victim of a sham marriage.
She, and the other estimated 15,000-20,000 women like her, have become known as “holiday brides” or “honeymoon brides” in India. Often these women come from rural parts of the country and are thus, because of the conservative nature of their society, unable to remarry after it has become clear they’ve been abandoned. In some cases, the women are left to raise the children of these marriages alone and these children rarely or never see their fathers.
Men who victimize women in this way are preying on the desires of many South Asian families to emigrate to the UK and they ruin the prospects of these women in the process. The dowery system is partly to blame as many parents feel they can sell their daughter into a better life abroad while the men profit and flee. According to the Daily News, a British groom, for instance, can fetch up to $33,000 in dowery expenses.
Punjab is the main hub for holiday brides. As many as one-third of the holiday brides in Punjab are married to British NRIs, with Canada coming in a close second. After a case was brought to light in which an NRI husband allegedly stayed with his wife in Kapurthala for a few months before abandoning her, the Punjab State Commission for NRIs was ordered to look into other similar cases.
Yet because the Punjabi police are inundated with many such cases, there is largely no effective way of dealing with the husbands and perpetrators of these injustices. According to a Canadian report conducted by the Vancouver Province, the police often attempt to bring the families back together through family counseling or otherwise simply resign themselves to winning back some of the dowery money.
While the Indian government is making special efforts to squash the holiday brides phenomena, it remains difficult to bring the perpetrators to justice as brides need to obtain an extradition treaty to bring their husbands back to India. Often, bureaucracy, a lack of understanding protocols, and complicated international extradition treaties, inhibit success of prosecution. The UK’s home office for example, confirmed they have received no extradition treaties from India.
The outlook on justice for holiday brides remains bleak without international intervention. Through establishing holidays brides as a form of human trafficking, and educating rural people on the dangers of these types of marriages, we can reverse their effects.