Nikah and talaq on the same day

HYDERABAD: In the conservative environs of the Old City, prostitution may be an ugly word. But, young girls here are increasingly being used as sex objects and prostitution is now rampant in the garb of contract marriages. 

Making prostitution a reality for many girls here are fly-by night grooms — Arab sheikhs — who come here for a few days and flee the city. The girls simply wait for yet another sheikh to marry them and hope that the money their parents make from this marriage would also fund weddings of their siblings. Many of these girls have been married for four to ten times, each wedding lasting for not more than a fortnight, say activists. 

At the time of marriage itself, the girl is made to sign a ‘talaq’ document along with the ‘nikah’ papers, where the period of marriage is also specified ranging from 15 days to a few months, according to Noorjehan Siddiqui, co-ordinator with Confederation of Voluntary Associations, a social group. Siddiqui explains that this is in gross violation of the teachings of Islam, but it is now a rampant practice as qazis connive with brokers fixing such marriages. No strict action has been taken against them yet. The police say it is a “religious matter and not a social evil”. 

Brokers have also started arranging marriages over the phone and parents are told to send their daughters to Mumbai for their passport and visa. 

“The girl speaks to someone over the phone who she accepts as her husband and is then taken to Mumbai. We rescued at least eight such girls in brothels of Pune,” says Sunitha Krishnan of Prajwala, an NGO. 

“Parents are most of the time unaware that their girls have landed in brothels,” says Nilima Mehta, chairperson of Child Welfare Committee in Mumbai, who has come across such cases in Mumbai’s brothels, last year. 

In the dusty lanes of the Old City, when burqa-clad kohl eyed women zip by in their two-wheelers, for a fleeting moment it appears that times have changed for women in the Old City of Hyderabad. It only needs a closer look to shatter the myth.