Kashmir's bride bazaar

Every year, as winter sets in, hundreds of Kashmiri locals board buses and flights for the plains in India. Some leave for a warmer place to run their businesses, others just to get away from the freezing winters. Fayaz Ahmad’s journey in 2017, though, was a lot more nerve-wracking. It followed weeks of preparations that included new clothes, visits to close relatives and the blessings of local clerics.“After a decade-long wait, I had finally found a woman,” says Ahmad, a 54-year-old Srinagar native with a salt-and-pepper stubble and a bald head. “I didn’t know her, but I was extremely excited.” A daily-wage labourer, Ahmad says he had grown used to the taunts about his inability to find a bride. In November 2017, the urge to put a lid on “this shame” prompted him to travel more than 2,000 km by bus and train to West Bengal to find himself a bride. “Even my relatives’ kids had got married but here I was, unable to find a bride,” says Ahmad, choking with emotion. “It was at one such gathering that a broker offered to find me a match in Kolkata.”Ahmad is one of many middle-aged men in the Valley who cannot find a life partner, mostly due to their social standing, physical challenges or advancing years. As is the case everywhere, families in Kashmir prefer working young men with a promising future for their daughters. This desperate search for brides has opened up doors for inter-state traffickers to hunt for young girls from desperate families willing to marry off their daughters to make ends meet.After three days of travel, Ahmad and a relative of his, along with the broker, reached Kolkata to meet the bride, the fourth daughter among eight siblings. They were ushered into a dingy room by the girl’s father and uncle and offered tea and snacks. In the evening, a local maulvi performed the nikaah of Ahmad, who was 50 then, and 19-year-old Asiya after the “monetary formalities” were completed. “It included Rs 55,000 to the girl’s parents and gold earrings worth Rs 5,000 for her,” says Ahmad. “All this happened amid complete silenceI think even the neighbours were not aware of the marriage.”.preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}A week later, when the couple returned to their home in Srinagar, relatives and neighbours began trickling in to greet the newlyweds, bringing sweets for the bride, says Ahmad’s brother. But matters soured very quickly. “She would seek the phone when we would go to bed and start talking for hours to her cousins,” says Ahmad, while showing a photo of Asiya he had on his phone where she is wearing a fancy pink dress he had bought for her. “She would stay awake till the wee hours, I couldn’t understand her language and did not know what she was talking about. She would weep and shout when I would go near her.”A bewildered Ahmad called the matchmaker who immediately contacted her family and demanded the money back. “Her father and uncle arrived at our home to try and persuade the girl, but it didn’t help,” says Ahmad. “I told them she does not want to listen to me.”According to Ahmad’s brother, the uncle said they couldn't return the money. “So he offered his own daughter to my brother. He even called his wife in Kolkata to ask her to send their daughter. But we rejected the offer as the girl was much younger than this one. We ended up losing all our money,” he says. It took a while but a despondent Ahmad has come to terms with the fact that perhaps marriage is not for him. He now spends most of his time praying and watching videos of televangelists.A lot of the heartland families who give away their daughters are also hoodwinked by the touts. In Srinagar’s downtown, Nasser (name changed), who works as a salesman, married Fahmeeda, a 22-year-old from Bihar in 2014, after paying Rs 80,000. “I desperately waited for 17 years to marry but couldn’t find a girl,” he says. “In Bihar, I was shown 4-5 girls in one day. They were all below 20, but the rates varied. On the same day, I was married after paying the money to the tout.” A ‘Bihari bride’ at her husband’s home in Srinagar; Photo by Abid Bhat After many years, he learnt that the tout had paid just Rs 5,000 to the family and kept the rest of the money. “I paid them (the girl’s family) from my own pocket later because they are living in absolute penury,” says Nasser. “The tout had lied to them, saying I was a businessman and financially well-off. They had accepted Rs 5,000 as a token, while the tout had promised them Rs 50,000. Now I can’t afford to travel and have not taken her home since then.”Though there is no credible data on the numbers, “buying Bengali brides” has attained a sort of normalcy in both urban and rural areas of the Valley. For instance, the Boatmen Colony in Bemina, Srinagar, which draws its name from the Dal Lake dwellers who were shifted here, has about 200 such women, according to rough estimates of social workers who have been on duty there. Similarly, in south and north Kashmir, many villages have paid money to get brides for men who cannot afford Kashmir’s lavish weddings, the costs of which sometimes send families into penury (previous governments have tried to discourage this trend by imposing controls on the number of guests and wazwan dishes, but all in vain).Sana Majeed Din, legal-cum-probation officer at the Anantnag district child protection unit, says most of the women are brought on a different pretext to the Valley, making it difficult to ascertain whether these are legal marriages or cases of trafficking. On November 1, she rescued a minor girl from Assam’s Sivasagar district who had been brought here on the promise of a job in the fruit-processing industry. “She travelled with eight other girls from her village to Kashmir in October. They were lured by their neighbour with a promise of a Rs 5,000 monthly salary,” says Sana. “In Kashmir, however, she was sold to a family as a domestic help. She somehow managed to flee and reach the railway station in Anantnag where the police rescued her.”Unlike the Assamese girl, most of them do not flee and become resigned to their fate. Dr Muzaffar Khan, a well-known clinical psychologist in the Valley, says a lot of these young women now face mental health issues. Even after spending many years here, they are still seen as outsiders and children born to them often face discrimination, getting stuck with nicknames like ‘Bengal’, ‘Bihar’ or ‘Punjab’. “The problems become worse if the man is a drug addict or has had an unsettled first marriage,” says Dr Khan, who heads a major drug rehabilitation centre in the Valley.But even as many such cases have come to light, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) figures for 2020-21 say that only one case of human trafficking was registered in J&K. Authorities say this is because most of the time, no formal case is filed. Experts, however, point to the absence of a government monitoring mechanism. Sana suggests involving grassroots ASHA workers who could report these ‘marriages’ to the authorities. “It is very difficult for these women to go to police stations because they are unfamiliar with the place, language, and do not know anyone,” she says.“Most of the time, they are not even allowed to keep phones and are under the constant surveillance of their in-laws,” says lawyer Faisal Qadri who was hired by the UNHCR to challenge one such case in J&K. A minor Rohingya girl from Myanmar had been trafficked to Kashmir and sold off to a middle-aged man in Anantnag for Rs 80,000 in 2015. After several months, she managed to contact her parents in Myanmar. They called an uncle who was working in Delhi and he approached the UN refugee agency who took up the case. “There should be a mechanism to register these people brought on the pretext of marriage or as domestic help. They are like bonded labourers now. Also, these placement agencies should be registered,” says Qadri.Desperate DrutchesIt was the many rejections that prompted Abdul Rashid Sheikh, whose legs were paralysed at a young age, to marry a girl from Bihar at the age of 43. Amid the pandemic, he travelled to Patna in June 2020. The family in Bihar agreed to the proposal after talking to him via video call, although they had initially rejected him. “They initially said they would have given their daughter if I had at least one leg,” says Sheikh, who is also the founder of the J&K Handicapped Association. “But they relented later.”The nikaah was solemnised by a local cleric. “I hadn’t seen the girl before. In fact, I was surprised at the speed with which they brought the maulvi in the evening and got things ready for the marriage,” says Sheikh, who runs an eatery along the Dal Lake.He now lives with his wife in the Nowpora neighbourhood in Srinagar. Sheikh says the entire marriage cost him Rs 1.2 lakh, including the Rs 10,000 he gave the broker. The family also took Rs 15,000 from him for the girl’s clothes and jewellery. “Poverty was the main reason they offered their daughter to me,” says Sheikh, who also received gifts from the girl’s parents. “I returned the silver articles her family gave us. They said they will keep it for their younger daughter’s marriage.”No Work and No BrideJ&K has one of the highest unemployment rates in India, 22.2 per cent, says data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry puts the number of people who lost their jobs within a year of the repeal of J&K’s special status on August 5, 2019 at 500,000. The job insecurity and ongoing armed conflict against insurgents has triggered much uncertainty. People now prefer government jobs and, indeed, the state is currently the largest employer with a 450,000-strong workforce in J&K. The job situation has resulted in delayed marriages because grooms with a secure job are scarce. The increasing presence of women in the workforce is also a factor.“With women, especially from the middle class, pursuing higher education and hankering for better jobs, the prospects for them getting a suitable match too become difficult,” says Dr Asima Hassan, member of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) in Srinagar who has done research work on ‘Conflict and Youth in Kashmir’. Dr Hassan says dowry and the tradition of extravagant weddings, too, contribute to the late marriages in Kashmir, particularly in urban areas.Gulzar Ahmad, a “traditional matchmaker” from Narbal on Srinagar’s outskirts, explains that it now takes him years to arrange a match as almost everyone wants grooms with a well-settled career and sound financial background.Covid has further exacerbated the situation. The losses were aggravated in Kashmir because the Covid lockdown was preceded by a military one in 2019 to prevent protests against the rescinding of special status to J&K.Published By: Vishakha SharmaPublished On: Dec 10, 2021--- ENDS ---

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Kashmir's bride bazaar

Desperate middle-aged men in Kashmir are turning to brokers to find them a wife for a fee. Families in the heartland are giving away their daughters to make ends meet.

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