{"id":1044,"date":"2016-05-18T01:09:02","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T01:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2026-07-17T13:57:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:57:48","slug":"the-desperate-housewives-of-haryana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=1044","title":{"rendered":"The Desperate Housewives of Haryana"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

O<\/span><\/p><\/div>

nly in Haryana can the campaign call of \u201cBahu Dilao, Vote Pao\u201d and the Twitter-ready \u201cSelfie with Daughter\u201d exist side by side. In the state that routinely brings up the rear of India\u2019s child sex ratio list (879 girls against 1,000 boys, according to the 2011 census), women are important enough to become election planks \u2013 but not important enough to be allowed to be born.\n\nBut female foeticide is not a new story in Haryana. It is a generational challenge. So rampant is the problem that lakhs of men in Haryana, for whom there are no brides, have had to form the Avivahit Purush Sangathan or the Unmarried Men\u2019s Union. Their WhatsApp groups reach out to this desperate community of unmarried men, which, according to some estimates, could be as many as 3.5 lakh. The organisation\u2019s long-term goal is to correct the sex ratio, but in the short term, their aim is to promote cross-cultural, inter-caste, and inter-state marriages.\n\nOver the last few years, the state\u2019s conservative families, notoriously hung up on gotras<\/a> and caste purity, have had to look beyond Haryana\u2019s borders to find brides for their men. If a family lucks out and finds a bride within the state, it is often on the promise that the groom\u2019s family will marry their daughters into the bride\u2019s family. Most families are unable to fulfil that condition, so it is now not uncommon to find women from Bengal, Assam, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and even Kerala, populating the dusty lanes of Haryana\u2019s villages.\n\nBut even this roundabout short-term solution has its pitfalls. These distant brides \u2013 from completely alien cultures, bred in different languages and contexts \u2013 are forced to parachute into villages where there is no comfort and no familiarity. Unable to adjust, they seek the refuge of their own homes, and often want to return. And in this struggle against gender imbalance, neither sex emerges the winner.\n\nA couple of decades ago, Raj Kumar* would not have found it difficult to get married. The youngest of two brothers, Kumar is 22, a matriculate, and works on a two-acre farmland on the Jind-Bhiwani highway. Despite his family\u2019s best efforts though, Kumar was unable to find a wife in his state.\n\n

With no family to reach out to, they are made to work like animals. Their physical appearance is ridiculed; their lack of fluency in Haryanvi is exploited.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nKumar\u2019s family then approached a matchmaker \u2013 scores of whom are active in Haryana these days, having facilitated dozens of such alliances \u2013 to help him find a spouse from another state. Touts across Haryana \u201carrange\u201d for lower-class, lower-caste women from Uttarakhand and Nepal because their fair skin is always in demand. Kumar\u2019s family shelled out \u20b950,000 to a matchmaker, and another \u20b91 lakh in gifts and cash to Ritu Devi\u2019s* family in Uttarakhand. His farmer parents sold half an acre of farmland to scrape together the hefty amount. To quell questions in their village, they told everyone that Ritu was a distant relative.\n\n\u201cUnlike others who \u2018procure\u2019 wives illegally, we were married according to Hindu rituals,\u201d says Kumar. But Ritu, who was had not even finished high school, deserted Kumar within six months. She went back to her home in the hills in January, promising to return, but never did.\n\nKumar appears as clueless today as he was a few months ago. His neighbours stopped asking questions after a week or two when it became apparent that Ritu was not going to return.\n\nFor the initial couple of months, Kumar and his wife appeared happy. His neighbours told the writer that Ritu had started complaining about the unhygienic conditions and the domestic chores that were being forced on her. This is a fate that meets many women who come in from other states: With no family to reach out to, they are made to work like animals. Their physical appearance is ridiculed; their lack of fluency in Haryanvi is exploited.\n\n\"Haryana\"

\n

Kumar\u2019s family shelled out \u20b950,000 to a matchmaker, and another \u20b91 lakh in gifts and cash to Ritu Devi\u2019s* family in Uttarakhand. <\/p>\n

Hindustan Times \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n\n\nBut Kumar rubbished these theories. He wondered if she did not like being corrected, or that she wasn\u2019t happy about not being allowed to socialise with the neighbours. \u201cWe are a conservative family,\u201d he told me. \u201cWomen should stay home and do chulha-chowka.\u201d He says that all he wanted from Ritu \u2013 despite everything he has endured \u2013 was a son.\n\nRitu\u2019s refusal to return home finds resonance in the dozens of brides that are brought into the state. According to Karminder Kaur, child marriage and prohibition officer at the Rohtak Women\u2019s Police Station, the number of cases of domestic violence and dowry harassment reported from the district have gone down in the past few years. But this isn\u2019t something to really cheer about.\n\nShe believes the complaints have decreased because these wives from distant lands have no recourse to the law. \u201cSuch women are very vulnerable,\u201d she says. \u201cThey are uneducated, do not understand the language; they can\u2019t even read signage,\u201d says Kaur. Recalling a 2015 case, Kaur says the victim narrated \u201charrowing details\u201d of her stay at her husband\u2019s house but was not ready to lodge an FIR against her in laws \u2013 her only plea was that the police arrange her return to her village in Assam.\n\nIt is unlikely that the state will be able to find an easy solution to Haryana\u2019s sex ratio problem in the coming few years. Until then, the state\u2019s half-brides and half-grooms, will continue to lie in limbo.\n\n* Some names have been changed to protect privacy.<\/em>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haryana\u2019s sex ratio has a new casualty: Uneducated brides from Uttarakhand and Kerala who are transplanted into villages where they find no comfort or familiarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":1047,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[170],"tags":[1856,1857,1858,1859,1860,19,1861,1132,1862,1863,131],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gender","tag-desperate-housewives","tag-haryana","tag-haryanvi-brides","tag-haryanvi-grooms","tag-housewives","tag-india","tag-intercaste-marriage","tag-kerala","tag-khap-panchayat","tag-trafficked-brides","tag-uttarakhand"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Desperate Housewives of Haryana<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Haryana\u2019s sex ratio has a new casualty: Uneducated brides from Uttarakhand and Kerala who are transplanted into 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