'Living the life of a hostage': Why these brides from Pakistan regret marrying Kashmiri men

A twenty-something Zarina had heard of a place so beautiful it was called the ‘paradise on earth’. To be in that place with a man she had fallen in love with was like opening one’s eye through a dream only to find it is reality. To live this beautiful reality, Zarina left her family, friends and life behind in Pakistan and arrived as a fresh-faced bride in Kashmir.

Just 15 year later, the ‘happy’ bride found herself roaming the streets of north Kashmir’s Kupwara town as a ‘madwoman’ with her love having abandoned her and her life turned into hell. The ill-fated transformation for Zarina has been brought about by a decade-long struggle in which she is joined by many other brides from Pakistan stuck in Kashmir with no rights and an effaced identity.

When she had landed in Kashmir, her husband, Bashir Ahmad Peer, and in-laws had filled the void in her life created by the family Zarina had left behind. Her new family initially treated her quite well. But the rigour of everyday life made everyone, including Bashir, grow indifferent towards her.

Bashir divorced Zarina and abandoned her and their two children. He then married another woman. The loss of paradise, pushed Zarina into acute depression.

The void was back and pierced through her with greater vigour. As she ached to go back home, she realised all roads leading to Pakistan were now shut — perhaps forever.

The Government of India has ruled out travel permits for Pakistani brides in Kashmir.

More than 350 women from across the border, who married Kashmiri men when the latter had crossed the Line of Control (LoC) for arms training in the 1990s and early 2000s, came to the Valley after 2010. They returned as the then Omar Abdullah-led National Conference and Congress coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir introduced a policy for return and rehabilitation of those who had crossed the LoC between 1989 and 2009 but never took part in active militancy. The policy asked them to come via four officially designated routes—Wagah-Attari in Punjab, Salamabad in Uri, Chakan da Bagh in Poonch and Indira Gandhi International Airport of Delhi.

Since their arrival in the Valley, the women have been demanding that they either be granted Indian citizenship or repatriated to Pakistan. While both the demands are being considered by the government, these Pakistani brides are finding themselves at the crossroads. “Where would a woman go when she is being divorced, abused and tortured,” wonders Saira Javid, one such bride from Pakistan fighting for the rights of women like her.

“We have no one to go to in Kashmir… Neither parents nor any relatives. This feeling made Zarina lose her mental balance,” says Javid. Saira along with few other women filed a police complaint against Zarina’s husband, a former militant who had gone for arms training to Muzaffarabad during the 1990s and got stuck there.

In 2017, the J&K government informed the Legislative Assembly that 377 ex-militants along with 864 family members, including their wives and children, came via Nepal and Bangladesh, and not from the officially designated routes.

Apart from facing the law of the land for their ‘illegal entry’, the real struggle for these brides started when they began living in Kashmir. “We have been living a life of a hostage,” says Saira, who was born and brought up in Karachi, and arrived in the Valley in 2011.

“In the absence of economic and emotional support, most of us are on antidepressant pills. While we support each other, we cannot be each other’s parents. We cannot replace our families for each other,” she says.

Saira, 44, lives in frontier Kupwara town, around 90 km from Srinagar in northern Kashmir and runs Bukhtawar Boutique and Parlour. She has employed around five Pakistani women, who are divorcees and taking care of their children as single parents. Saira came to Kashmir in 2007, three years before the rehabilitation policy for the former militants was announced. She came through the Wagah border with documents but was booked under the Foreigners Act here. She faced three and a half months of jail time along with her two children.

“But the case went on for eight years,” she says. “Finally, I succeeded when my in-laws intervened through the State Subject document of my husband. But the whole episode left me deeply scarred.”

Since then Saira has been doing the rounds of government offices, including the Ministry of External Affairs and Pakistan Embassy, in New Delhi to clear the decks for homecoming.

“Officials at the Pakistan Embassy inform me that they regularly raise our issue with the Indian Foreign Ministry, which turns it down saying that we don’t want them to leave Kashmir.” Amid the official inertia, Saira is losing her loved ones back home while she is in “exile” one by one.

“I lost my father, younger brother, aunt and other relatives while struggling to go home,” she laments. “I now wish to see my loved ones in my dreams only.” But beyond the tanking Indo-Pak relations halting the people-to-people contact, many locals rise for this ‘humanitarian cause’ and join these women whenever they arrive in Srinagar for protest. Longing for home and their families sometimes makes them go an extra mile.

One Pakistani bride had to call her parents on the other side of the Line of Control, somewhere in northern Kashmir–where one can see people from the other side– just to get a glimpse from a distance. “The school where I worked as a teacher had arranged a picnic to Teetwal area in Kupwara for me as they always saw me sad,” recalls Tayiba, a 33-year-old Pakistani bride from Pattan area of Kashmir.

“So, I called my parents and asked them to reach the other side of Teetwal along the LoC on the day the picnic was organised. When I finally saw them I felt like jumping into the river that divided us and hugging them forever. But then, I thought about my kids and stopped myself.”

Tayiba had married Aijaz Malik, a former Kashmiri militant and came to Kashmir in 2012 via Nepal. “I married him just to live a peaceful life,” she says. “But I was not aware that we would end up in this beautiful cage.” The Indian government, Tayiba says, neither provides the Pakistani brides travel documents nor citizenship. “They don’t accept us, as we, according to them, fail to qualify the nationality clause.”

Even as the Pakistani brides are denied citizenship, Sheikh Showkat Hussain, prominent academician and legal expert, argues that an International Convention on Nationality entitles married women to be the citizens of countries in which they are married and the same applies to these Pakistani wives. “Law is completely on the side of these Pakistani brides, but there’s a paradoxical situation here,” Hussain says. “Since many of them belong to Muzaffarabad (in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), the government of India doesn’t consider it part of Pakistan while these women carry Pakistani identity papers. So, it has become a hurdle for their departure as well as their citizenship demand. This is an absurd situation which is yet to find a legal solution.”

The government doesn’t allow even women from outside POK to travel back to their country because most do not have proper documents. The Kashmiri families of many Pakistani brides destroyed their documents such as visas and passports soon after their arrival in the Valley in a bid to ensure they can never go back home. While a few have their documents, the government contends that they did not enter the country through the four designated routes and so over the years not a single Pakistani bride in Kashmir has been able to head back home even to just go visit her parents.

Seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, a Pakistani bride committed suicide in Naidkhai area of north Kashmir’s Bandipora district in 2014.

Meanwhile, Tayiba, an MBA graduate, continues to take part in the routine protests for the cause. She believes that’s the only way to ensure international intervention.

“But so far, not a single international organisation has approached us. Even our parents back in Pakistan try to meet the government, NGOs, etc, but nothing has helped,” she says.

Prof Noor Baba, a noted political analyst from Kashmir, however, feels it’s not difficult for New Delhi and Islamabad to come up with a solution for the sake of these women stuck in a limbo. “These Pakistani brides have become victims of the circumstances and there is a need for humanitarian intervention,” Baba says. “And since they are on the Indian side, the Indian government needs to take an initiative and either provide them citizenship or deport them. Both the countries should have mutual understanding on the issue, but sadly, the Indo-Pak diplomatic relations are at a low right now.”

Apart from homesickness and denial of rights, domestic issues are equally harrowing for these women. Some of them now live as a single parent after being divorced by their Kashmiri spouses. “I fulfilled my husband’s wish of coming to Kashmir as he was missing his family,” Bushra, another Pakistani bride, says. “Instead of being my support in Kashmir, he divorced me and took my children. I am now living with another Pakistani bride who is also divorced. I manage my living by working in a parlour.”

Hailing from Muzaffarabad, Bushra married Altaf Bhat of Pattan and came to Kashmir in 2012 via Nepal. In 2016, she approached the district commissioner of Baramulla to send her back to Pakistan. “We have been listed in voter lists, we have an Aadhaar card, but when it comes to citizenship and passport, we are considered illegal immigrants,” Bushra says.

“All these years, we have met former chief ministers Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, and lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha and other government officials but they only do lip service.”

In absence of any assured support, these brides are slowly fading into oblivion. Since 2010, around 15 Pakistani brides have died. Those surviving are battling mental health issues. “Whenever we hear about a family member’s loss back in Pakistan, we gather in solidarity and share each other’s grief,” says Bushra. The only relaxing moment for them is a telephone or WhatsApp call to their families.

In 2019, when the clampdown and communication blockade was imposed in J&K in the wake of the abrogation of Article 370, some of them even went to Delhi just to be able to tell their families in Pakistan that they are safe.

Many of these women, who came to Kashmir to see the ‘paradise on earth’, fear facing a fate similar to Zarina’s. “We don’t want any of us to roam on the streets and tear our clothes in frustration,” Saira says. “We just want humanity to prevail and our miseries to end.”