She was married in a no-frills ceremony to the man who paid her mother 30,000 rupees ($460). I was promised gold, money and a house for my parents. “The broker convinced me that my life would change if I married him. He was 62,” the girl told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I was 14 and our neighbor told us that a rich Arab boy was looking for a bride. Growing up in a one-room tenement that she shared with her five siblings and parents, an offer to marry a rich man seemed like the perfect escape for one seventh grader who did not want to reveal her identity. They are ignorant of the consequences,” Satyanarayana said. “They think they will see the Burj Khalifa (Dubai’s landmark skyscraper) and live in palatial homes like Atlantis (hotel) if they marry an Arab. The trend turned into a business in recent years after a qazi was sanctioned by the government to perform “Arab marriages”. Their descendents continue to live in the city and older generations recall “good marriages” of Hyderabadi girls to young Arab men visiting relatives in the city in the 1970s and 80s. In the 19th century men from what is now Saudi Arabia and Oman were recruited as soldiers by the Nizam (ruler) of Hyderabad - then a princely state in southern India. Girls are easy to source and most marriages are performed after the festival of Eid which agents said is “season time” when tourists from the Gulf visit Hyderabad - which has links to Gulf Arab states dating back centuries. “Contract marriages in this part of Hyderabad have been going on for many years, but it has now become an organized, international trade (of girls), involving agents and qazis from different Indian cities and also the Gulf,” Satyanarayana said. Nearly half the brokers arrested were women who had been victims of the crime themselves, police said. In the crackdown, 14 girls, all under 18, were rescued before they had been married off. In the few cases when the young brides did accompany their husbands back to their home country, they were forced into domestic servitude or sexual slavery, police said.Ībout 30 people including brokers, qazis, prospective bridegrooms from Oman and Qatar and hotel owners were arrested last month and charged with human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children, said police officials. Satyanarayana, a deputy commissioner of police in Hyderabad who is investigating the issue. The men would come on tourist visas, perform a contract marriage and leave after a month,” said V. “Most of the girls do not know that they will be abandoned within 15 or 20 days of the marriage.
The main qazi who performed these marriages in Hyderabad was arrested last month. The marriages were performed by a Muslim officiant, or qazi, who forged the bride’s age to show her as an adult. Police in the southern Indian city, a hub for tech companies, last month busted a racket involving wealthy men from Gulf states such as Oman and Dubai “marrying” teenage Muslim girls in Hyderabad for the duration of their stay in India.Īt the time of the marriage, the men signed post-dated divorce documents, to be delivered to the brides after their new husbands had left the country. Most marriages were ‘time pass’,” Khan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “The men came with old, used bridal clothes, soaps and nightgowns for the girl they would marry. They (the men) gave the rejected girls 200 rupees ($3) to go back home,” said Khan, now a police informer. “We lined up 20 to 30 girls for each Arab in a hotel and he would select one. Khan struck two kinds of deals: ‘Pucca’ meant long-term marriages where the girl would fly back with her husband to his home country, and ‘time pass’ marriages that lasted for the duration of the man’s stay in India. THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/ROLI SRIVASTAVA An awareness poster in Urdu language asking parents not to marry their daughters with Arabs for money at the office of a charity, Shaheen, that works with victims of such marriages in Hyderabad, India, Sept 26, 2017.
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