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By APD writer Rishika Chauhan
NEW DELHI, May 26 (APD) - The Indian External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj on Thursday, thanked Pakistan for its help in bringing back an Indian citizen stuck there.
Uzma Ahmad, a young Indian woman from Delhi, was able to return home after a court in Pakistan facilitated her journey back to her home country. The Indian High Commission officials and Pakistani police personnel escorted her from Islamabad, through the Wagah border into India.
Talking at a joint press conference in New Delhi, Ahmad spoke about her plight and reason to return. She said that she was forced to marry a Pakistani man who used to physically abuse her. “They have tortured me in many ways, threatened to kidnap my daughter. So I agreed to marry him to save my daughter. He used to beat me up. Because of my daughter I signed it, they scared me so much that I signed.”
She had submitted a petition at a court in Pakistani on May 12 requesting it to allow her to return to India immediately, as her daughter from her first marriage was suffering from the disease thalassemia. She had been staying at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad since then.
Uzma’s husband, Tahir Ali, had told the court that she was being kept at the high commission without her consent and their marriage was not forced. Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani heard the arguments of both sides and allowed Ahmad to return to India.
Before taking refuge at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, Ahmad had been living with her husband in the remote district of Buner in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. She will continue to fight the case against her husband and his family through her lawyer in Pakistan.
Sushma Swaraj
During the press conference Sushma Swaraj said that despite the current tension between India and Pakistan, the Pakistan foreign office and home ministry had played a an important role in brining Ahmad back home. The episode is being taken as a rare moment of cooperation between the neighbors in this tensed time.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
