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Marriage: The perfect crime

By Raymond Thibodeaux
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW DELHI
Sunday, Dec 09, 2007, Page 19

Laws in India are designed to protect women from fraudulent marriages, but are often ignored, leaving the new bride and family in a predicament. PHOTO: AFP

Like many young Indian women in search of husbands, Sneha Singh combed through the pages of matrimonial classifieds in the daily newspapers until she found what she thought was a perfect match: a man from a decent family, with a good education, a US passport and lucrative salary as a software engineer in California's Silicon Valley.

She envisioned a new life for herself in sunny California. She found later that almost none of it was true, but by then she had already tied the knot.

As many as 30,000 Indian women, according to a government estimate - experts say the true number is likely much higher - are duped every year into fraudulent marriages by husbands living abroad.

It is part of a growing problem in India, where rising prosperity is spawning what many here only half-jokingly call the "wedding industrial complex" as the cost of weddings and dowries given by the bride's family spiral upward.

At the time of her wedding, Singh was 32 and eager to start a family of her own.

PHOTO: AFP

"There were warning signs from the very beginning, but the wedding preparations had a momentum of their own, making it difficult to speak up. Two days after marrying him, I realized I had been duped," said Singh, now 35, with long black hair, high cheekbones and a confident smile.

The soaring dowries are creating an incentive for fraud, analysts say.

In India's more prosperous cities, it is not uncommon for grooms to walk away with dowries of about US$100,000. Some dowries reach as high as US$500,000 in cash, gold, diamonds and property.

PHOTO: AFP

Dowries are prohibited in India by a rarely enforced 1961 law. In fact, fathers often take out bank loans to help pay for a daughter's lavish wedding, usually seen as a once-in-a-lifetime event.

In their eagerness to marry off their daughters to Indian people working abroad, families often ignore one very important marriage protocol: background checks.

Parents don't want to ask a suitor probing questions that might seem impolite, discouraging him from the marriage. That's according to a 94-page booklet titled Marriages to Overseas Indians, put out by officials at India's Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, an agency created three years ago to look after the 25 million Indians living abroad.

Within two weeks of Singh's marriage, her husband returned to the US without her, but with more than US$2,000 in wedding gifts. He promised to apply for her visa so she could join him in California, but never did. Months later, Singh's father began receiving threatening letters from his new son-in-law demanding tuition money for an advanced business degree.

As it turned out, her husband, 40, had been unemployed and receiving welfare checks in the US, she said. Also, he was a serial groom, having been married at least a dozen times. Marriages in India are seldom registered with state authorities, as is required by law.

Many marriage scams are carried out by non-resident Indians - often with American or European passports - who breeze into India for a couple weeks seeking brides with huge dowries, then flee to their adoptive countries to evade prosecution by Indian authorities.

The stigma surrounding failed marriages is so strong in India that wives abandoned by their non-resident Indian husbands are more likely to bear it quietly, without taking the husband or the husband's family to court. Although exposure to the West is gradually changing social values, divorce is still rare enough that the word is often whispered in India.

"It's absolutely the perfect crime, and it's a big problem," said Madhu Gand, a member of India's parliament and an adviser to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs.

Women's groups in India and in many Western countries are pushing for laws that make marriage fraud an extraditable offense.

"We have laws in India that protect wives from fraudulent marriages, but if the husbands live in Britain, the US or Canada, and especially if they have citizenship in those countries, there's not much we can do to them right now. That's something we need to work on," said Gand, who owns a law firm in New York.

Most abandoned brides never file their cases with the police or the courts because it is a stain not only on the girl, but her entire family, said Singh, who used her experience as an abandoned bride to start the ARK Foundation, a non-profit agency that helps women who have been defrauded or abused by their non-resident Indian husbands.

Expatriate Indians often cave in to parental pressure to marry at home, usually to a woman the parents have already picked out. It is not uncommon for a prospective groom to return to India and be married within days to a woman he has never met.

To marry one of the nearly half-million Indians seeking work or studying abroad every year is seen as prestigious in many parts of India, especially in the northern state of Punjab, where most families have at least one relative living abroad.

For many Punjabi women, marrying an expatriate Indian comes with the promise of good jobs for both spouses and an escape from India's often suffocating family customs in which wives usually are expected to run the household and care for in-laws.

Statistically, marriages between resident and non-resident Indians don't last long. Recent studies by several Indian women's groups found that the vast majority of them fail within the first two years.

One study found that five out of every six failed. The cultural gap between the spouses is often too wide to bridge.

"It's a gamble," said Singh. "But many parents are willing to play this gamble with their daughters."
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