McCartney and Mills: Lucky not to be in India

Hyderabad, Oct. 27: If Heather Mills held an Indian passport, Paul McCartney might have been forced to make an unscheduled visit to India, not to make but to face the music.

He would be extradited and hauled up before an Indian court to fight accusations of wife-beating.

With hundreds of Indian brides being abandoned or abused by their NRI grooms after being married against a huge dowry, Andhra Pradesh police have decided to treat these men on a par with the Abu Salems and Dawood Ibrahims.

They have got Interpol to issue red-corner notices for 300 NRIs accused of ill-treating women they married in the state, and hope to get about 25 extradited before the year-end.

US police have already started extradition proceedings against V.R.V. Suryanarayana Raju of Connecticut, who will be tried in India for allegedly harassing wife Aruna for dowry and then deserting her.

“Interpol has issued more than 300 red-corner notices to police in the US, the UK and other European countries for such husbands, mainly software engineers,” said S. Umapathi, deputy inspector-general of police.

“By year-end, we expect almost 20 to 25 such extraditions. The family courts in Hyderabad, Vijaywada and Visakhapatnam are snowed under complaints of cheating and wife-beating by NRI husbands,” another officer said.

The intercontinental hunt has been made possible by recent talks the foreign ministry has had with many governments abroad. All that the victims or their parents have to do is file a police complaint with prima facie evidence of the grooms’ guilt.

However, the husbands — foreigner or NRI — can be extradited only if the bride is an Indian citizen.

A red-corner notice was issued this month against a man from Tirupati, now based in Canada, for bigamy. “He already had a wife there. But he married my daughter during a visit to India and took her to Canada to work as a maid at his home,” said the bride’s father, Srinivas Rao.

One UK-based groom is accused of marrying three Indian women, including one from Hyderabad. “He had graduated from a well-known B-school in Hyderabad,” an officer said.

“About 15,000 NRI weddings take place in the state every year and almost 20 to 30 per cent of them end in divorce,” said city marriage consultant Anasuya Rao.

The state’s NRI marriage industry has a turnover of over Rs 600 crore, insiders say. The police are getting the mushrooming matrimonial consultancies and websites registered, so that they can access these agencies’ data bases and keep a tab on their functioning.

Rao’s agency has churned out the CVs of almost 25,000 NRI brides and 15,000 NRI grooms. It costs a would-be groom Rs 10,000 to meet a girl. “There are at least 25 such agencies specialising in NRI grooms and brides,” she said.

The police say the girls’ parents are partly to blame — eager to marry their daughters to dollar-earning grooms, they don’t check up on the men’s background thoroughly.

The problem had prompted the Union ministry for overseas Indian affairs to decide to publish a booklet advising parents on how to avoid being duped by NRI grooms.