Jatha woman, who married Pak man, a widow with 3 kids

AMRITSAR: In perhaps the first instance of its kind, a Sikh woman who had gone to Pakistan on pilgrimage, ended up converting to Islam and marrying a man in Lahore. Kiran Bala, 31, is a widow from Garhshankar town in Hoshiarpur who has left behind three young children with her father-in-law. She has married Muhammad Azam, who she claims she has known for over a year and a half through social media.
While Indian authorities are wondering if she has been coerced into converting and marrying the Lahore resident, the Shiromani Gurdwara Management Committee (SGPC), has alleged that this is a failure of Indian intelligence officials. Every year before pilgrims are sent to Pakistan in a 'jatha', passports are inspected by Indian authorities and many of the applications are rejected. The present jatha has about 1,800 people.

While Kiran, who has been rechristened Amna Bibi, claims that she has married and converted to Islam of her own accord, her father-in-law Tarsem Singh, a former granthi , has sought foreign minister Sushma Swaraj's help.

‘She has been ISIS indoctrinated’

Talking to TOI over phone from Lahore on Thursday, Kiran aka Amna Bibi said, “It was not Facebook (that we met), it was social media.” She, however, refused to say which social media account she had used. “I did everything by myself, no one forced me to do anything,” she insisted. She hurriedly hung up the phone saying, “Please don’t disturb me, I am in court and I am very busy now.”

Amna had left for Pakistan with an SGPC-led jatha to celebrate Baisakhi via the Attari land border on April

12. On April 16, she went to Lahore-based Dar-ul-Ulaoom Naeemia and embraced Islam after which she married Azam. On the same day she wrote a letter to Pakistan’s interior ministry seeking extension of her visa and alleging a threat to her life in India.

Tarsem Singh fears that Kiran was persuaded by radical Muslims to wage Jihad against non-believers. “I fear she has been indoctrinated with ISIS ideology and converted to Islam but still I need her back home to take care of her three children,” he said.

Amna was married to Tarsem’s son Narinder Singh in 2005. Narinder worked in a gas agency and died in a road accident in 2013. “She called me from Pakistan a couple of times after April 12 to ask about the well-being of her children and everything seemed normal. That was until her last call when she said she had converted to Islam and married. I thought she was joking,” he said Tarsem is now worried about bringing up his three grandchildren — two boys and a girl aged between 8 and

12. “I had gone to see her off when she went to celebrate Baisakhi in Pakistan and had told the jatha leader to bring her back safe,” he said.

Additional secretary of SGPC, Diljit Singh Bedi, said they collect passports from people aspiring to undertake pilgrimage to Pakistan and send these to the government for verification. “Often, names of many pilgrims are struck off,” he said, adding that the security agencies couldn’t be absolved of their responsibility, especially when there were reports that she knew a Pakistani man for a long time.

SGPC has also demanded an inquest into the incident.