PROVOKED: Kiranjit Ahluwalia (centre), a victim of domestic violence who murdered her husband, was released from jail in the UK in 1992 on grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’

Smriti ? wherever she may be ? would have been pleased with the turnout. For one of the first things that social activist Ranjana Kumari was told after she landed in Hyderabad was that the hall that had been booked for her may well be too big for the gathering she had in mind.

Kumari, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Social Research (CSR), was making arrangements for a session on gender issues at the fourth Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in the southern Indian city. One of the organisers of the show ? a government-led event where people of Indian origin (PIO) across the world gather to tell their tales of successes and defeats ? escorted her to a hall which could accommodate some 300 people or so. Would she, the guide suggested, like to book one of the smaller halls instead?

“I told him he had no idea what kind of a response this was going to evoke. And, sure enough, when the session started, the hall was overflowing with people,” Kumari recalls days later, sitting in her Delhi office. “For two years, we have been trying to persuade the government to discuss issues relating to Non-Resident Indian (NRI) women. We had suggested that there be three sessions. Finally, there was just one ? but it was such a success.”

Quite possibly, Smriti was at the back of Kumari’s mind when, as the president of WomenPowerConnect (WPC), an umbrella body of groups seeking to lobby on gender issues, she approached the government to include the problems of NRI women in its annual Pravasi Divas meetings. “A lot of women come as delegates or spouses ? but all that the government organises for them are bazaars,” says Kumari. “We wanted it to address the many serious issues that concern women.”

Issues, for instance, that confronted Smriti, a Delhi-based journalist who had worked with CSR for a while. Daughter of a colonel, she had been married to an NRI groom 10 years ago. Her father paid for all the wedding expenses, including the travel costs of the groom and his family. The groom spent one night with his wife and left for home in the United States the day after. He took her jewellery as well, stressing that it would be safer with him. She was supposed to have joined him a month later.

But once the groom was gone, he never got back to her. Smriti and her family made frantic enquiries. They got in touch with the place where he said he was employed ? but were told he had never worked there. The home address didn’t lead to the groom or his family either. “Smriti was in a curious position. She had spent a night with her husband and believed that she was married to him and had to find him somehow,” says Kumari.

Her family did all that it could do to trace him. Finally, Smriti left for the United States some years ago in search of her elusive husband. Kumari hasn’t heard of her since then.

At the Hyderabad conference, though, there were several women who had similar stories to tell. Abandonment by NRI husbands was a common complaint. Some men did it for money, some because they felt their wives wouldn’t be able to adjust to the West, and some because they had been forced into marriage by their parents.

But the government ? aided by the WPC and the National Commission for Women (NCW) ? now hopes to put an end to this trend. Plans are afoot to set up an NRI gender cell which will deal with issues such as marriages and abandonment. “The government is very serious about going ahead with this,” says Malay Mishra, joint secretary, ministry of overseas Indian affairs, the organisers of the Pravasi meets.

Married life for NRI women in the West, the activists seem to stress, is not necessarily an El Dorado. “There are some genuine problems that Indian women living abroad face,” says Girija Vyas, chairperson of the New Delhi-based NCW. “There are three major problems ? that of married women being abandoned, trafficking and the plight of domestic workers,” she says.

The problem of wives being abandoned by their NRI husbands is rampant in the north and in cities such as Hyderabad ? regions from where men migrate to the West, or the Gulf, in large numbers. According to one estimate, some 70,000 Indians migrated to the United States in 2001 alone.

“There are many cases of men demanding a dowry from the bride’s family in India,” says Vyas. “And these are some of the reasons we need a regular gender cell which people can approach when they face problems,” she says.

Domestic violence is another problem among NRIs. Recent studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom highlight the fact that south Asians living there are subject to domestic violence. Women’s groups have questioned a particular study ? the National Violence Against Women (NVAW) survey ? which, after contacting some 16,000 people on the telephone, said only 12.8 per cent of south Asian women faced physical assault.

“Some doubt is cast on the NVAW survey by two in-depth studies of domestic violence among south Asian women in the US, both of which found high levels of abuse,” says the CSR. One of the studies ? conducted in 2000 ? found a lifetime prevalence of violence in 77 per cent south Asian women. The other ? carried out in 2002 ? said 41 per cent of south Asian women it had interviewed in Boston had faced violence from their partners, leading to physical or sexual injury.

The cell ? once it does come up ? may ultimately look at issues such as domestic violence. Right now, though, the three subjects it seeks to take up are marriage, adoption and employment ? issues that were discussed in Hyderabad.

The government is planning to start a national consultation from next month on the role of a gender cell. “The cell is very much on our agenda,” stresses Sandhya Shukla, director, social services of the ministry of overseas Indian affairs. “We are going to look at different views and then conceptualise the cell,” she says.

WPC believes that a booklet ? listing all the dos and don’ts of a marriage ? would help both men and women. One of the complaints heard in Hyderabad, for instance, was from a middle-class girl who had been married abroad and had found, much to her dismay, that she was expected to clean the house and wash dishes. “We had to tell her that this was the way of the West. A booklet would also explain that is not just a woman’s chore, but is shared by men,” says Ranjana.

The cell, the group hopes, would make people aware of their rights and the laws that are applicable to them. WPC also hopes that the US government would bring about a change in some visa rules. The spouse of a person working in the US on an H1B visa, for instance, does not have the protection that the Violence against Women Act gives to other immigrant women.

There is a plan to rope in the Indian missions abroad as well. “For every marriage, there should be a system under which a potential groom would have to submit his social security number to the mission,” says Ranjana. “Marriages would have to be registered. And all this would curb fraudulent marriages,” she says.

Smriti, wherever she may be, would be pleased.