For tens of thousands of Indian women, a marriage that seemed too good to be true ended up being exactly that. The New York Times reports on the plight of these women, who marry an Indian man working overseas expecting to then follow him to a better life in countries like Australia and Canada. Instead, they get abandoned, with their new husbands returning abroad without them. Many of them end up forced to live with their in-laws "in accordance with local social customs, even for decades," with the women never laying eyes on their husbands again—and their dowries vanishing with the men. Some women say they're beaten by their in-laws when they don't provide additional money for their overseas husbands.
A retired judge who helmed a commission looking into the practice in the state of Punjab puts it like so: "The boys come, they enjoy, and leave with the dowry money. Then they get married again in foreign countries for citizenship. It is just treachery." There's little legal recourse for these women (a petition filed to the nation's Supreme Court seeks to change that), though they can fight to get their husbands' passports revoked.
A 2019 Reuters article on the subject reported that over an 18-month period, one group of women managed to get more than 400 passports suspended and another 67 revoked. However, as Reuters put it, "Indians living abroad aren't an easy group to take issue with." Known as non-resident Indians, or NRIs, they send huge sums of money back home—their remittances are bigger than those of any other country, hitting an estimated $100 billion in 2022, reports the BBC. (More India stories.)
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