New Delhi: The over 2,000-mile border between India and Pakistan is rarely known for love.
Witness to Partition and its ensuing animosity, the Line of Control has always dared lovers to cross it. The few who did were met with suspicion, arrest, and repatriation.
But Mumbai’s Mahendra Kumar and Karachi’s Sanjugata Kumari got damn lucky. The Indian advocate met the Pakistani woman on social media – the most common conduit of love among the two countries’ citizens. They fell in love, families stepped in to facilitate wedding planning, and everything was finalised on WhatsApp.
Mahendra flew to Pakistan with his family last week, and the couple got married in Sukkur in the Sindh province. The festivities were enjoyed with Sindhi songs, attended by relatives of both the families and members of the Sukkur Hindu community, including the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP ) minority wing, Rajkumar.
Mahendra said he was delighted that Sanjugata said “yes” to his proposal without hesitation. “Our wedding slogan is samaa (union) because we believe in bringing people together regardless of their religion, caste, or nationality,” he told a local channel.
Eshwar Lal Makhija, president of Sukkur Hindu Panchayat who attended the function, emphatically said that love has no borders.
That adage certainly may be true in this case, but many star-struck lovers before Mahendra and Sanjugata have not been so fortunate.
Ones that ended in jail
In September 2022, Iqra Jeewani, 19, crossed over to India illegally from Pakistan’s Hyderabad. The “shy” girl sold jewellery and borrowed money from friends to buy tickets to Dubai, and then to Kathmandu. Her partner Mulayam Singh Yadav, 21, met her in Nepal at the end of her circuitous journey, and the two got married before coming to India and living in Bengaluru.
Iqra met Yadav while playing online ludo in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. On the day of her departure in 2022, she disappeared on her way to college.
The Bengaluru police recovered Iqra after neighbours complained of a woman offering namaz in a Hindu household. The woman was detained and handed over at the Wagah border in February. Her parents collected her from Lahore.
Iqra’s love affair was “closed forever”, her father Sohail told the news agency PTI; her uncle Afzal thanked the Indian and Pakistani governments for “ending this terrifying chapter”.
Yadav, meanwhile, was jailed for facilitating Iqra’s visa-less entry and even getting her a fake Aadhaar card.
In 2005, a student named Vishal in Pune, too, was arrested but paid a higher price.
Vishal started chatting with Karachi’s Fatima Sallahudin Sha. Hours of Internet chats, hundreds of phone calls, two trips to Pakistan and a promise of converting to Islam ended with Vishal’s arrest for espionage in 2007. He served a sentence of seven years.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)