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, Meghan Davidson Ladly of the New York Times reported.
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, Nusrat’s parents also brought a legal case charging that Bhatti had kidnapped her.
“I don’t care about my father and mother,” Nusrat 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.
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 organisation active throughout Pakistan.
When a woman disagrees with her parents’ choice of husband, she has few options, Mahnaz said, adding that 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 dishonoured 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, Nusrat and Bhatti were neighbours. The complication was evident from the start. Nusrat 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, and could not be reached for comment.
The couple secretly married in a court on Aug. 11, 2007, then waited until 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.
Nusrat’s father soon began harassing Bhatti’s father for the return of his daughter or some monetary compensation. Eventually, the family charged Bhatti with kidnapping for ransom. In court, Nusrat 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 newspapers as “freewill marriage notices,” subverting the traditional concept of the marriage announcement to fend off accusations of abduction and adultery.
The sanction against freewill marriage “has neither to do with law nor with religion,” Rahman said. “It has to do with culture. It has to do with lack of education.”
Most of the cases Rahman sees come from rural, impoverished areas where tribal councils, or jirgas, hold more influence than state courts.
For women who have married without the consent of the family or who have refused the spouse picked for them, community justice is often worse than a long court battle.
In its 2011 annual report, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization, found that, according to news and field reports, at least 943 women were victims of so-called honour killings that year, 219 of them because they wanted to choose a spouse.
Such realities did not discourage Nusrat from making her choice. She was, she said, too consumed by anger on the day she left home. “If they are not allowing me to get married, than I will do it,” she recalled telling herself.
Bhatti is trying to negotiate an end to the feud so the couple can live in peace, but his wife’s family is demanding Rs 200,000. He earns Rs 200 a day. Still, he says, he and his wife are content. “We are happy with our every decision,” he said.