Irish Times (Ireland): Afghan girl jilted by Indian army officer closes in on justice

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0113/1231738220609.html

Afghan girl jilted by Indian army officer closes in on justice
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
RAHUL BEDI in New Delhi

A 20-YEAR OLD semi-literate Afghan girl has taken on the Indian army after being ditched by one of its officers, who married her under false pretences during a posting in Kabul three years ago.

Sabra Khan seems to be winning as her persistence has resulted in a preliminary military court ruling that Maj Chandrasekhar Pant of the Army Medical Corps be charged with bigamy and converting to Islam without prior official permission.

“I don’t want him back in my life,” Sabra said. “He tried to buy me out of the marriage. I threw the offer back at him telling him that money cannot buy my love or my forgiveness. Now I want him punished.”

Sabra learnt Hindi by watching Bollywood films, which earned her a job at Kabul’s Indian Mission Hospital in Kabul in 2006.

It was there she ended up working closely with Maj Pant, who was posted there for nine months.

The 40-year-old Indian officer was so smitten by Sabra that he approached her family three times for permission to marry her; but he was turned down each time for being an Indian and a Hindu.

But when he offered to change his religion and become Muslim, changing his name to Himmat Khan, they agreed, believing he loved Sabra enough to convert.

After a lavish wedding the couple moved into a rented house in Kabul, but the honeymoon lasted barely a fortnight as Maj Pant returned home, claiming to have been recalled by the army.

Six months later he called Sabra and suggested she remarry as he already had a wife and two children. All communication thereafter ceased and Sabra’s humiliation in a highly conservative society began. “Strangers would taunt my mother for marrying me to an Indian instead of an Afghan,” Sabra recalled.

Eventually fed up with playing the abandoned wife, Sabra arrived in Delhi last month armed with her nikamnamah or Muslim marriage certificate, a picture album and a video of the wedding. From there she embarked on a two-day bus journey to the small hill town of Pithoragarh in the Himalayas, where Maj Pant worked.

“Courage comes only when you fight your pain,” she said. “I had lost everything a person can possibly lose and there was nothing to be scared of now.”

She presented the major with three options: to let her live with his family in India; to move to Afghanistan with them; or to return to Kabul to secure a divorce from the same qazi or priest who had solemnised their union.

He turned them all down and offered her money instead, which she rebuffed.

Finally, with the help of local women’s groups and journalists in Pithoragarh, Sabra registered a complaint with the police and lobbied the army for justice, which appears imminent.