INDIA: A young pregnant Indian woman, torn between two husbands, has used a TV show to declare that she would return to her first spouse who was freed recently by neighbouring Pakistan five years after being declared a deserter by the army and given up for dead, writes Rahul Bedi in New Delhi
In a case that has challenged the usually conservative views of India's Muslim population, Gudiya, the young woman from a Muslim village who is pregnant with her second husband's child, decided on the widely watched Zee television network last night that she would leave her current husband, Taufiq, and return to Sapper Mohammed Arif.
Her village council in northern India's Uttar Pradesh State has tried to settle the matter by declaring, after eight hours of heated deliberation, Gudiya's second marriage void.
But their decision has triggered domestic strife as well as public debate over Gudiya's future course of action.
The debate that is dominating many leading 24-hour news channels also centres around whether the returning soldier should accept Gudiya's unborn child.
Being Muslim has further complicated matters, as the Ulema (Islamic clerics) have joined the debate and invoked the Shariat, or Muslim law, on the affair.
They declared that Gudiya's first marriage to Arif was valid and that she could return to him without any religious ceremony. The child, however, they decreed would be Taufiq's heir, and all Shariat laws would apply to his upbringing.
Arif and a fellow sapper had gone missing in the 11-week long border conflict with Pakistan in northern Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region in 1999, after which the Indian army declared them "absconders".
But amid a peace process with Pakistan launched earlier this year, Islamabad informed Indian officials that Arif and another soldier had been taken prisoner, and released them last month.
Following a debriefing by the army, Arif returned last weekend to his village to a hero's welcome.
But to his chagrin he found that his wife, Gudiya, whom he had wed just a few weeks before the Kargil conflict, had remarried with her parents consent to Taufiq, a local from the village, and was eight months pregnant.
"I love her and have no problems taking her back," Arif said. Earlier, Arif had declared that he wanted the child to be left with her parents or her second husband.
Yesterday, however, he agreed, under public pressure, to allow the baby to be with his wife.
Gudiya, who is expected to move soon to her parents' home to give birth, wants her baby to be with her.
Taufiq has further muddied matters by declaring that he wants Gudiya back. It appears that Gudiya is obviously in love with him and eager to remain with him, but dare not say so out of fear of reprisals and subsequent public shame.