DEBT EXACTS A TERRIBLE PRICE
Taken from family and married off to a man who says they owed him money
Young Pakistani girls are being married off to settle disputes or pay debts,
MIRPUR KHAS, PAKISTAN // Jeevti was 14 when she was taken from her family in the night to be married to a man who said her family owed him 100,000 rupees (Dh3,503).
Jeevti’s mother, Ameri Kashi Kohli, is sure that her daughter paid the price for a never-ending debt. The manager of the land they work on forced their daughter to convert to Islam and took her as his second wife. Ms Kohli said she and her husband had borrowed about 50,000 rupees from the land manager but that the debt had been repaid.
It is a familiar story in southern Pakistan: small loans balloon into impossible debts, bills multiply, payments are never deducted. In this world, women like Ameri and her daughter are treated as property, taken as payment for a debt, to settle disputes, or as revenge if a landowner wants to punish his worker.
Sometimes parents, burdened by debt, offer their daughters as payment.
The women are like trophies to the men. They choose the prettiest, youngest and most compliant. Sometimes they take them as second wives to look after their homes. Sometimes they use them as prostitutes to earn money. Sometimes they take them simply because they can.
“I went to the police and to the court. But no one is listening to us,” said Ms Kohli, who is Hindu.
“They told us, ‘Your daughter has committed to Islam and you can’t get her back’.”
More than two million Pakistanis live as modern slaves, ac- cording to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, which ranks Pakistan in the top three countries where people are still enslaved, some as workers on farms or at brick kilns, others as household staff. Sometimes the workers are beaten or chained to keep them from fleeing.
“They have no rights and their women and girls are the most vulnerable,” said Ghulam Hayder, whose Green Rural Development Organisation works to free Pakistan’s bonded labourers. An estimated 1,000 young Christian and Hindu girls, most of them underage and impoverished, are taken from their homes each year, converted to Islam and married, according to a report by the NGO South Asia Partnership.
The night Jeevti disappeared, the family had slept outside – the only way to endure the summer heat in southern Sindh province. In the morning, she was gone. No one heard anything, her mother said.
The family turned to female activist Veero Kohli to help free the girl. Ms Kohli, who is not related to the family, was born a slave. Since fleeing bondage in 1999, she has devoted herself to challenging Pakistan’s powerful landowners, liberating thousands of families from bonded labour. Her defiance outrages many men in a country dominated by a centuries-old patriarchal culture.
“I know that they would like to kill me, but I will never stop fighting to free these people,’ she said.
Five months ago, she went with Ameri to the Piyaro Lundh police station to find Jeevti. The police said the girl went willingly, Ms Kohli said. “I told them: ‘Let me talk to her. Let her mother talk to her if she went freely’.” They refused. Instead, they called in the man whom Jeevti’s mother said had taken her. Hamid Brohi came alone, without the girl.
“He said, ‘anyway, she is payment for 100,000 rupees they owe me’,” Ms Kohli said.
When she returned to the police station, officers produced an affidavit in which Jeevti, now going by the name Fatima, said she had converted to Islam and married Mr Brohi of her own free will. She also said she could not meet her mother because she was now Muslim and her family was Hindu.
Under pressure, police in a jeep with a mounted machinegun finally took Ms Kohli and a for- eign reporter to visit the girl. Her mother did not go, too afraid, she said, to confront the police in person again.
Mr Brohi greeted the police with an embrace. He denied that he had taken Jeevti as payment for her family’s debt despite his earlier boast to the activist that he had done just that.
Inside, Jeevti sat on a mattress on the floor, her head wrapped in a black shawl. Although she did not seem afraid, her eyes darted to the door where her husband hovered. When she spoke, her words seemed rehearsed.
“I married him because I wanted to,” she said. “I myself asked him that as we are lovers, we should get married. So he said, ‘let’s get married’ and I said yes.” She denied that she had not seen her mother since leaving home. But she could not say when she saw her mother last or even where she lived now that the family had fled its former home. She was quiet when asked why her court affidavit said she had refused to talk to her mother because of her own conversion to Islam.
She said she did not know what was in the court documents, although each one the police produced said Jeevti had spoken the words herself.
The next day, the visitors returned without a police escort. Inside the compound there were only women and no one knew of Fatima. The door to the room where she had sat the day before was padlocked.
It was as if the compound had been simply a stage set for a young girl’s performance.