Pakistan: women taking risks & marrying for love

[summer]

NYTimes

KARACHI, Pakistan — Nusrat Mochi, now 25, left her parents’ home one day to go to work and never returned. Instead of starting a job as a domestic worker, she ran away to begin a new life, against her family’s wishes, with a husband of her choosing rather than the one they had chosen for her. Her parents’ wrath has trailed her ever since.

In the four years since she and her husband, Abbas Bhatti, now 27, eloped, they have moved twice to escape threats to their lives, they say. Even today, with two small children, they try to keep the location of their home a secret. If threats were not enough, Ms. Mochi’s parents also brought a legal case charging that Mr. Bhatti had kidnapped her.

“I don’t care about my father and mother,” Ms. Mochi said, sitting in her two-room house and cradling her youngest child in her lap. “When they are sending some person to kill me, how can I?”

Their story illustrates the conflicts some women encounter in Pakistan when choosing what are known here as freewill marriages. It also shows how women are increasingly asserting their rights against the traditions of forced marriage and parental authority, implicitly challenging one of the most powerful institutions in Pakistani society.

Though some form of arranged marriage remains the most common way for Pakistanis to find spouses, marriage without the consent of a woman’s guardian was legalized in 2003. The change in the law has created a larger opening for many women to claim their independence, using the courts and the local news media. Ms. Mochi’s parents’ suit was defeated in a Karachi court in April.

The tactics have given more visibility to a problem long considered largely a private matter.

“Things are changing; the girls are becoming bolder, they are continuously taking steps, and they are not afraid to die,” said Mahnaz Rahman, resident director of the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organization active throughout Pakistan. “They know that they will be killed, but even then they are taking these steps because they can’t conform to the values of their parents. They are the girls of this modern age.”

When a woman disagrees with her parents’ choice of husband, she has few options, Ms. Rahman said. If she wants to marry someone else, the two must elope and leave the family home behind. By leaving the home, though, the daughter is considered to have dishonored her family, and that is where culture, custom and the legal system intersect with retribution.

Parents frequently press kidnapping charges to regain control of a renegade daughter. Such cases can engulf entire families, as the police will often seize property and detain relatives of the accused man.

When they met and fell in love, Ms. Mochi and Mr. Bhatti were neighbors in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, a section of Karachi. The complication was evident from the start. Ms. Mochi had been promised since birth to her father’s cousin, 15 years her senior. Her family refused to end the engagement.

Her parents have since moved back to their ancestral home, a village in the Rajanpur district of Punjab Province, and could not be reached for comment.

The couple secretly married in a Karachi city court on Aug. 11, 2007, then waited until Mr. Bhatti was able to save money and secure a home for them in another part of the city before making their escape the following year.

Ms. Mochi’s father soon began harassing Mr. Bhatti’s father for the return of his daughter or some monetary compensation. Eventually, the family charged Mr. Bhatti with kidnapping for ransom.

In court, Ms. Mochi was able to testify that she had not been coerced and could produce the affidavit she had signed on their wedding day declaring that the decision to marry was her own.

Such affidavits have become crucial tools in conflicts over freewill marriages. Not only are they produced in court to validate these unions, but they are also presented by women to local Sindhi-language newspapers as “freewill marriage notices,” subverting the traditional concept of the marriage announcement to fend off accusations of abduction and adultery.

link to pg 2
www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/world/asia/some-pakistani-women-risk-all-to-marry-for-love.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world&src=me

[Kattey]

How very brave of these women.

[aurora]

Sept 10, 2012 2:57:58 GMT -5 summer said:

...
“Things are changing; the girls are becoming bolder, they are continuously taking steps, and they are not afraid to die,” said Mahnaz Rahman, resident director of the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organization active throughout Pakistan. “They know that they will be killed, but even then they are taking these steps because they can’t conform to the values of their parents. They are the girls of this modern age.”
...

Quotes like this make me so thankful that I was born in the U.S., and I really admire the strength of these women. How many of us would be willing to risk death to have married the man of our choice? I mean, I know many people would say they would, but really?