https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd547/whatsapp-group-abandoned-indian-punjab-men-wives-in-canada?utm_source=viceinstain
Inside a WhatsApp Group for Indian Men Whose Wives Left Them for New Lives in Canada
They paid a fortune to send their wives ahead to a future in Canada, hoping they’d follow on a spouse visa. But with the women finding solace from dreary lives back home, these husbands say they’re now left lonely and bankrupt.
Jhujar Singh’s marriage was straight out of a dream.
Three years ago, the resident of Punjab in northern India was 24 when he was introduced to his wife who was 18 then, just about the marriageable age according to the Indian law. And though the arranged marriage set-up meant the two had met just a couple of times before their wedding, he had gradually fallen in love with her.
So, one day, when his wife spoke with him about her dream of relocating to Canada – the far-off country which immigration-obsessed Punjab looks at as almost their home base – he gave it serious thought.
Jhujar knew that his wife had excelled at academics, getting far better grades at school than he ever had, and had already started preparing for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exams – an English language proficiency test widely regarded as an important tool for global migration.
So, he happily funded her Canadian voyage with the hope that once she was settled there, it would pave the way for his move too. He told VICE that he spent nearly Rs 1.8 million ($24,000) on her tuition for IELTS, clothes, tickets, visa fees and rent.
“For the first two months, we were constantly in touch,” Jhujar told VICE. “We would chat on video call almost every day.”
And then, she ghosted him, blocking his number and changing her address in Canada.
Jhujar’s situation is not unique. And now, he and around 80 other men have come together to form a WhatsApp group named “Thugiya de Peedit” (Victims of Fraud). They all share a similar story: The husband and his family fund the woman’s education in Canada with the hope that she will get residency there, and then, be able to take her partner along. But within a few months, the wife goes off the grid, which sometimes also culminates in the discovery that she has a new partner in Canada.
The state of Punjab traditionally records a high efflux of its citizens to Canada. The Punjabi population in Canada is both statistically and socially strong, their influence reflecting in everything, from road signs being displayed in Punjabi (it’s Canada’s third most spoken language) to a record number of members in the parliament (even more than in the Indian parliament).
But life in Canada for the women who might’ve “abandoned” their Indian husbands would look vastly different from the one they left in India.
“For Punjabi women in the villages, there is absolutely no freedom,” said Satwinder Kaur, the founder of the non-profit Abandoned Brides by NRI Husbands Internationally (ABBNHI), which helps women — and now, even men — who’ve been abandoned by spouses living abroad. “No parent can claim to give their daughter absolute freedom in Punjab. So, when these smart women – often in their early 20s – go to Canada, what are the chances they will want to fall back into a life they never wanted to begin with?”
Sometimes, couples expressly marry so that they could realise their individual goals of migrating to Canada. This is often referred to as a “contract marriage” even though Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, does not agree with the term. “For the longest time, men have been abandoning their wives. So, the newfound sympathy that men seem to be eliciting seems misplaced.”
The Ministry of External Affairs recently informed the parliament that it received 4,698 complaints from wives abandoned by their husbands between January 2016 and May 2019. There is no official data on the number of men abandoned by their wives. VICE tried reaching out to some of the women accused by their husbands of abandonment but did not receive a response from any of them.
How did this trend emerge though, we ask. Ravinder said that this can be traced to the fact that most Punjabi men end up becoming complacent in the way they approach employment.
“The fruits of the green revolution (the agricultural surplus boom in the 1960s) have petered out. These men usually have some land but they waste time loitering around. Also, we have all heard about the drug and alcohol crisis in Punjab.”
Punjab’s drug crisis has reached deep within its cities and villages, making users out of every imaginable demographic: policemen, teachers, school kids, housewives, sex workers, farmers and domestic workers. Punjab’s rate of drug-related crime towers over other states, with reports stating that at least half of inmates in its jails are either convicted or facing trial under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS). The recent Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey (PODS) found that there were more than 200,000 opioid dependents in Punjab. Additionally, deaths due to drug abuse in Punjab have only increased after the pandemic.