By Sunrita Sen
Barely two rings and the phone is answered by a low, gruff voice: “Commandos?”
This telephone number has been a lifeline for hundreds of young Indian lovers desperately seeking help as parents, kinsmen or their community harass, blackmail and even threaten to kill them.
Marrying for love is not always easy in India where arranged marriages are still the norm. Parents carefully match caste and family status and scan physical attributes and horoscopes to fix a marriage.
For couples who transgress boundaries of caste, community, religion and, at times, social or economic status, it could be at best excommunication from the family and at worse death for what is considered besmirching its honour.
The Love Commandos, a voluntary group founded in 2010 by a number of New Delhi-based men — among them journalists and businessmen — are trying to give India’s Romeos and Juliets an opportunity to fight back and live life on their own terms.
“They call us. We give them protection, shelter, legal assistance. Sometimes we have to rescue them if they are locked up by parents. The police help us,” says Harsh Malhotra, commando co-ordinator.
“We spend our funds — all from donations — to get them married soon after they arrive. They can stay with us for as long as they want, we give them food, clothing.”
We are at one of the seven secret shelters the commandos run in and around the capital. It’s all very cloak-and-dagger.
We wait near a cinema hall in the bustling Paharganj area. A man sidles up to us and whispers, “Love commandos?” Yes, we nod and then follow him — at a distance — through lanes and bylanes to the safe house.
The entrance is through the kitchen where a couple of newly-wed young women are busily cooking. A commando attends to phone calls in a room, while in another, founders Malhotra and Sanjoy Sachdev tell us about their operations.
Two young men housed at the shelter have gone out without informing the commandos. Malhotra is tense. “They can get picked up, they could get killed,” he says. “They’ve been told never to move without our protection.”
“We are always armed with pepper sprays, we have direct lines to the police,” he adds.
Official statistics are not available on the number of young people killed for defying traditions in order to marry for love as honour killings are not officially listed as a crime in India.
According to Shakti Vahini, a voluntary organisation working in the field, it could be anything between 600 to a 1,000 killings a year.
The commandos have six core members who are the visible faces of the organisation. “We are under both threat and debt, we don’t want to endanger all the others who are working with us,” says Sachdev.
The group claims to have helped 25,000 couples marry. They field 300 to 500 calls a day and their small network has now spread countrywide with 11,000 volunteers across several states.
The Love Commandos survive on donations by well-wishers and the money that the couples seeking shelter contribute. “Often those we have helped in the past chip in with funds and provide shelter for a few days to couples.”
Bhaskar, 28, and Puja, 22, have been staying at the safe house since November 2012. They come from fairly well-off middle-class families and life is not easy at the shelter.
There is no running water and the couples share mattresses in the loft-like upper room which is accessed by a steep ladder. Their belongings stacked behind them, it looks like a railway station waiting room.
But they are all smiles, happy to be married and together after a long and unsuccessful struggle to convince their families. “Now we have left it all to Papa,” says Bhaskar, pointing to Malhotra.
“This is a shelter, not a honeymoon place,” Bhaskar adds. The couple has just returned from the High Court where Puja signed a statement saying she married Bhaskar of her own free will.
Bhaskar works for a financial firm in Mumbai, Puja lived with her parents in the eastern city Kolkata. They met at a wedding in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh in 2009 and it was love at first sight.
“For the next three years we would talk on the phone, we met just thrice,” says Bhaskar.
When they told their parents, it was a firm “No.” They belonged to different castes, Bhaskar was a Bramhin and Puja a Rajput, one of the land-owning castes.
Puja’s family complained to the police. “They kept harassing me. My family fixed my marriage to another girl. Five days before the wedding, I took the train to Kolkata, waited for two days till Puja could escape and we came straight here,” says Bhaskar.
Heena holds Puja’s hand. She’s been through more to be with Ashish — three years of being locked up at home, beaten and not allowed to attend school. Finally they ran away — to the Love Commandos.
Ashish, 23, and Heena, 20, lived in the same neighbourhood in New Delhi, about 15km away from the safe house.
Ashish is an orphan, he worked at a coffee shop chain, and their castes are different. “My family was totally against our relationship. The neighbours kept telling Ashish my brothers would kill him if he continued to see me,” Heena says.
“This caste system is a curse,” Malhotra says. “Our constitution guarantees marriage by choice.”
The roots of the Hindu caste system goes back more than 3,000 years to when people were segregated according to their historical occupation. In modern India it has no meaning, but caste prejudices persist with inter-caste marriages often frowned on.
Love is tougher if one of the couple comes from the Dalit community (the so-called untouchables) and the other partner from a higher caste or if one is a Hindu and the other a Muslim.
Malhotra sadly remembers Abdul Hakim, a 29-year-old bank clerk who went back to his village to see his ailing mother when he thought things had settled down but was then killed by his wife’s family. “Abdul and Mehwish lived with us for a year. Her child was born here.”
“But we have not lost too many of our lovers. We have managed to relocate most of them in towns away from their families. We keep a watch on them till we feel they are safe,” says Malhotra.
“We are simply giving voice to young people who do not have a mouthpiece to speak for them to seek their rights, their fundamental and constitutional rights,” Sachdev says. “We don’t want India to be known as a land of the killers of love. With the Love Commandos we want people to know that in India there are saviours of love as well.” — DPA
Bhaskar and Puja, a couple given shelter at the Love Commando safe house in Delhi.
