Wives of runaway husbands on a mission to help women like them

Regional passport officer Sibash Kabiraj, Chandigarh said in the past year-and-a-half, the women volunteers have managed to suspend 400 passports and revoke 67 others. More than 5,000 women have filed abandonment complaints with the ministry of external affairs.

In a pink-walled room of a government office in Chandigarh, Indian women spend their days cancelling the passports of runaway husbands.

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Midday on a Monday, the father of a woman who married a merchant marine is explaining how the husband lied about being single and failed to disclose the fact that he had a child and a warrant for his arrest. The case, says worker Amritpal Kaur, should qualify for immediate impoundment of the man’s passport.

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.

Sibash Kabiraj, regional passport chief in Chandigarh, says it all began when the wives started coming to him and pleading for help.

A lifelong civil servant, Kabiraj realised 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.

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 faraway husbands, he says.

THE VOLUNTEERS

Reena Mehla 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 US embassy, US Citizenship and Immigration Services and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, searched Facebook, and eventually found him.

She scrolls through dozens of emails she sent to foreign officials and the letter showing his passport was revoked; according to the US justice department immigration court hotline, his status in that country is pending. Then she pulls up one of their wedding pictures and kisses it.

When asked if she still loves him, Reena stretches her arms and grins. “Too much!”

Even though she has a master’s degree in education, sometimes she seems more like a teenager than a 30-year-old.

She shares her flat with several women, including Amritpal Kaur, who forked over $28,000 (around ₹20 lakh) on the dowry and wedding. Three days after they were married, Amritpal says, her husband told her to get $14,000 (around ₹1lakh) 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 later, he told her he had a surprise. She was so excited that she ordered a $3,500 (around ₹2.5 lakh) diamond ring for him. His surprise, she says, was divorce papers.

As a reminder of their mission, they’ve named the computer folder that holds their files “Mission Shakti,” after the divine feminine force in Hindu belief.

THE ACTIVIST

Every day, women with husband problems pile into Satwinder Kaur’s family courtyard at Toosa village in Ludhiana. She’s helping nearly 400 women who’ve been abandoned by their men, she says, getting several of their runaway husbands deported from their adopted countries and jailed. Satwinder’s own husband left her in 2015. He now lives in Poland.

Satwinder runs a WhatsApp group and Facebook page, and tells rural Punjabi women what paperwork they need to cancel their husbands’ passports. She also organises protests.

Even for Satwinder, who has filed 11 court cases against her husband, it’s hard to be a middle-aged, childless woman whose husband has left her. Her ferocity is in constant battle with her fear.

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.

A lecturer and electrical engineer, her husband, Arvinder Pal Singh, lost his job and moved twice. He told Satwinder he would send money again when he had it. Two months later, she filed a case with the police and his father was arrested, he says. He later got a call from the Indian embassy saying his passport had been cancelled. He stopped sending money and filed for divorce, which didn’t go through.

THE POLICE OFFICER

Baljit Kaur lives two lives. In the first, she’s a policewoman, composed and authoritative in a pressed uniform and red lipstick. In the second, she’s an aging bride, abandoned by her husband and sleeping under sheets printed with red hearts.

Baljit, 42, was one of four siblings born to an army officer and his wife in Punjab. She waited for her siblings to settle, so, at 39, was late to marry. When pushed, she paid huge dowry, even though as a cop, she knew such payments were illegal.

Before the wedding, Baljit says, her fiancé 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.

She last spoke to her husband on October 6, 2014. They have been locked in a legal battle ever since.

THE MOTHER

Sarbjeet Kaur’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 – again, for school fees, this time at her new, cheaper school.

Sarbjeet married Daler Singh in 2008. It wasn’t until she was pregnant that he talked of going abroad, she says. Daler went to South America first, then Mexico, Sarbjeet says. She sold her jewellery for almost $5,000 (over ₹3.5 lakh) to help him cross into the United States in late 2010, she says, and borrowed $3,600 ( ₹2.5 lakh) from her parents to help him enter Canada four years later.

In 2015, he asked for a divorce, saying he needed a paper marriage to a Canadian woman so he could stay while the government processed his refugee application. When Sarbjeet confronted the new woman in a series of audio messages on Facebook, the other woman said she would also fight. “You have a daughter,” she said. “I have a son.”

When Ekampreet was 3, Sarbjeet tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison. Five years later, she tried again by slitting her wrists. She went twice to a hospital in Amritsar for depression.