"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."
RSS