India's runaway NRI husbands

Amritpal Kaur (left) and Reena Mehla work together in the regional passport office. Kaur isn’t your usual Indian bureaucrat. She isn’t a government employee at all. She and the other women who work in the passport office are abandoned wives, volunteering their hours at the office to help women like them.

Kaur speaks to a woman who visited Kaur to ask for advice on a personal issue. Sibash Kabiraj, regional passport chief in the city of Chandigarh, says it all began when the wives started coming to him and pleading for help.

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.

Kaur shows photos from her wedding album. But there was a problem in this country notorious for its bureaucracy. “One suspension of a passport, it requires a lot of paperwork,” he says. Not one to be stopped, he explained passport law to the women, gave them a room with a computer, printer and fax machine, and told them if they would do the paperwork, he would sign it.

It’s the women’s best way of seeking justice from their far-away husbands, he says. In the past year and a half, the women have managed to suspend more than 400 passports and revoke 67 others, Kabiraj says. In all, more than 5,000 women have filed abandonment complaints with India’s Ministry of External Affairs. The women in his office, Kabiraj says, “have created terror” in several foreign countries.

Indians living abroad aren’t an easy group to take issue with. They sent $79 billion in remittances to India in 2018, the most of any country in the world, according to World Bank data. They’re expected to send $82.2 billion in 2019.

A closeup of the dress that Baljit Kaur rented for her wedding. 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. They’re known as non-resident Indians, or NRIs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called NRIs the “brand ambassadors of India.” But Indian government policy think tank Niti Aayog nicknamed them “non-reliable Indian grooms.”

The wives say many of the men demand – and often get – tens of thousands of dollars in dowry, despite the ancient practice being illegal. The husbands can use that money to establish themselves overseas and obtain permanent residency or a new passport, leaving their wives and children behind – and in limbo.

An abandoned woman has no status, says Shiwali Suman, who organizes abandoned wives in New Delhi. “Are we divorced, single, widowed?” she asks. “What are we actually? We are not able to be categorized.” 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.

The wives left behind don’t see it that way. In recent months, city and rural women alike have begun staging protests. One woman at a recent protest in Jalandhar, in Punjab state, said time was up for the runaway men: “There’s a fire erupting in all of us.”

Reena Mehla, right, was 24 when she got married. Five years later, she says, her husband told her he was going to work extra police duty shifts elsewhere in India, and instead hired human smugglers to take him to the United States. Rahul Kumar now lives in the Bronx. Reena wrote to India’s Ministry of External Affairs, the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, searched Facebook, and eventually found him.

When Amritpal talks about her marriage, she keeps coming back to the money she spent on it: She says she forked over $28,000 on the dowry and wedding; three days after they were married, she says, her husband told her to get $14,000 more from her father. Her husband, Kulpreet Singh, said all the money she had earned working for two years in England also needed to come to him, she says. Two weeks after the wedding, he left for Australia. For months afterward, he told her he had a surprise. She was so excited she ordered a $3,500 diamond ring for him.

Satwinder’s own husband left her in 2015. He now lives in Poland. She sends her husband WhatsApp messages every day. She can tell he’s read every one of them because of the little blue check marks, but he hasn’t replied since January.

Ekampreet, 10, laughs with her mother Sarbjeet Kaur at their house in Gurdaspur, Punjab. Kaur and her daughter live at their in-laws house after the court granted permission for them to stay there.

Sarbjeet’s husband stopped sending money for his daughter’s school fees in 2016, with three months left in the term. Sarbjeet sold her sofa and two cupboards so she could finish. Last year, she sold the gold earrings her parents had given to her daughter – again, for school fees, this time at her new, cheaper school.

Ekampreet gets ready to go to school. Sarbjeet married Daler Singh in 2008. Singh went to South America first, then Mexico, Sarbjeet says. She sold her jewelry for almost $5,000 to help him cross into the United States in late 2010, she says, and borrowed $3,600 from her parents to help him enter Canada four years later.

Women, who say they have been abandoned by their NRI (non-resident Indian) husbands, take part in an organised protest outside the regional passport office in Jalandhar, Punjab.

Neelam, who says her NRI (non-resident Indian) husband abandoned her, reacts at an organised protest in Jalandhar, Punjab.

Before her wedding, Baljit Kaur 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. One month and two days after they married, her husband returned to the United States. He’d lived there before, and they’d talked about moving there together. A week after he arrived, she says, he called saying he had no job and needed her to send money. She refused.

Baljit Kaur's police uniform is laid out on her bed. She last spoke to her husband on Oct. 6, 2014. They have been locked in a legal battle ever since. She has been granted ownership of their house and has won maintenance costs, but those have yet to be paid, she says. She has spent more than $4,000 on lawyers’ fees. “I have a job, I can manage. But what about the girls who can’t?” she says.