CHANDIGARH: The Regional Passport Office (RPO) has suspended passports of 11 NRI husbands over last week as central government officials said that Non-resident Indian (NRI) men who wed in the country will have to compulsorily register their marriages within a week and update marital status on their passports. The men have been dodging their wives and the authorities and left the country. Such cases are in abundance and the women have been put through endless agony.
“There are nearly 12,000 such cases, pending for action, under the RPO, Chandigarh, which has jurisdiction over 24 districts in Punjab and Haryana in addition to Chandigarh,” said Regional Passport Officer Sibash Kabiraj. A victim from Bathinda was unaware of what she was getting into when she married Trilochan Goel, a resident of Surrey, Canada, last year. “The match was arranged through a matrimonial advertisement. They wanted only my belongings and gifts, as even his parents knew of his first wife in Canada,” she said. She added that within a month of the marriage, her husband and mother-in-law assaulted her. “I conceived and was sent to my parents' home. He visited my parents twice, but only to get me to give him the wedding gifts that I had. By December, I knew of his first wife in Canada,” she said.
Another woman was married to Haryana police head constable Rahul Chauhan from Amin village in Kurukshetra. She had no clue that he was planning to go to the US with the help of his paternal uncle. Chauhan disappeared in 2017, on the day of Karwa Chauth, turning her life into an endless wait. On filing a missing report, she was informed that her husband had managed to flee the country on fake documents. The panchayat decided that she had to stay at her in-laws, where she was tortured. She managed to flee and is now forced to live a listless life.
