"Forbidden Love"
August 27
NBC aired the longest story ever concerning Sikhs on prime-time TV called "Forbidden
Love" on the program Dateline NBC. Unfortunately for us it was a very sad
and disturbing story.
The story as portrayed by NBC...
"Forbidden Love" was about a young girl named Jaswinder Kaur (Jasse)
who was born and lived in Vancouver, Canada. She and her extended family who
owned a blueberry farm lived in a sprawling compound there. The head of the
household was her uncle. Her father was not mentioned in the story. When Jasse
was a teenager, she went with her family to India for a wedding. There she met
and fell in love with a young man named Sukhvinder Singh (Mittoo), a rickshaw
driver. Jasse never told her family about Mittoo, but she managed to keep in
touch with him by mail. The mail would go to a beauty school where Jasse was
a student. This went on for several years.
Jasse's family introduced her to a number of men for marriage, but she refused
them all. She was in her mid-20s by now. Her uncle was especially angry with
her. Jasse convinced her mother that perhaps a trip to India to meet other men
would be helpful. But when they got to India, she secretly married Mittoo in
a Gurdwara with two friends present. A few days later she went back to Canada.
Jasse wasn't able to keep the marriage a secret for very long though. Her relatives
in India found out and told her family in Canada.
Jasse was put under house arrest at the family compound. Her friends at the
salon were very worried. She had often told them about how strict her uncle
and mother were, and that if she ever did anything wrong they would kill her.
But surprisingly, Jasse's uncle had a change of heart and told her that he would
bring her husband back to Canada. All she had to do was notarize a letter about
their marriage for immigration purposes. The letter was written in Punjabi which
Jasse could not read but signed anyway. What she didn't know was that her uncle
had written statements about Jasse being forced into marriage at gunpoint. And
when he went to Punjab with the letter, he showed it to the police who in turn
arrested Mittoo. When Jasse found out she called the police to escape from her
home. She then drafted her own letter, notarized it, borrowed money from her
friends and took the next flight to Punjab. There she showed the letter to the
police who then released her husband. The two ended up living together in his
mother's house.
A few months later, as Jasse and Mittoo were returning home from an evening
shopping trip, two men stopped their scooter. Mittoo was hacked at with a sword
and left for dead. Jasse was dragged into a car and taken to a farmhouse 40
miles away. There she was beaten and killed. Her body was found the next day
in a ditch, badly beaten with slashes in her neck and chest.
After questioning Jasse's relatives in Punjab, they confessed that the uncle
and mother asked that they hire hit men to kill the couple for $50,000. The
police arrested two suspects for the murder. They told the police that after
they took Jasse to the shed they talked to her uncle and mother in Canada. The
uncle, Surjit, gave the word to kill her. Although the suspects later pled not
guilty, the police confiscated their cell phones and obtained phone records
which show a call made from Jasse's home in Canada to the killer's cell phone
at the time of the murder. They also confiscated the sword, the murder weapon.
Both Jasse's friends and the Sikh police officer investigating the case said
that her uncle and mother felt that she had dishonored them by marrying a man
who was poor and of low caste. The Punjab police arrested 11 people, two murder
suspects and 9 of Jasse's relatives in Punjab for conspiracy of murder. They
also have warrants to arrest Jasse's uncle and mother and are seeking their
extradition.
Although the murder happened two years ago, Canadian authorities have not pressed
any charges against anyone. They said that they were looking into the methods
of confession and evidence gathering used by the Punjab police. But their reasons
were mostly vague.
The story was based on interviews with three of Jasse's friends at the beauty
school, a former Sikh girl who is now divorced, and a Sikh police officer.
Analysis...
Mix love with murder and what you get is a breeding ground for the news media.
This story was no exception. It was portrayed with all the sensationalism expected
of such a story. And it was especially damaging for the Sikh community because,
although the producers of Dateline NBC tried to give "painstaking sensitivity"
to the Sikh religion and community, it would be difficult for any non-Sikh watching
the show to differentiate between the Sikh religion and Indian traditions. Scenes
of Gurdwaras and the Sikh sangat are shown several times during the program.
The reporter compares the conflict between the girl and her family as old versus
new, ancient customs versus modern values, and East versus West.
The Dateline NBC producer told SMART that Sikh experts were consulted in creating
the program but they still managed to make two serious mistakes. The first one
was that they referred to arrange marriages as a Sikh tradition when it is an
Indian tradition and has nothing to do with the religion itself. They made it
seem like all Sikh women are forced into arranged marriages with old men. But
most Sikh marriages are ones in which the families do the introductions, but
the final say rests with the couple. The second big mistake was that the murder
weapon was referred to as a kirpan. The producer, however, may not be completely
to blame for this mistake because the Sikh police officer himself was referring
to the sword incorrectly as a kirpan. The murder weapon was actually just a
sword, a talvar, readily available in Punjab. Kirpan is a Sikh word derived
from the word "kirpa" which means "mercy". In fact, the
suspects using the sword did not look like Sikhs. Non-Sikhs cannot claim a sword
to be a kirpan and a sword cannot be called a kirpan because of it's style.
In the long segment about how Jasse was murdered, only 10 seconds were spent
explaining the religious significance of a kirpan and how it was only used for
self-defense.
It is unfortunate that NBC chose to air this two-year-old story at this time
with the 9/11 anniversary approaching and the ongoing kirpan controversy in
Canada. The hour long program was a slow and painful ordeal for our community.
The impression one is left with after watching the program is that Sikhs are
a backward people entrenched in ancient patriarchal traditions and they force
their daughters into unwanted marriages. Jasse's uncle, who looks like an amritdhari,
is the only relevant person in the story with a turban and a long beard. He
is portrayed as a person obsessed with family prestige to the point of taking
extreme measures - in other words, fanatical. This only reinforces the image
of what many Americans have of people with turbans and beards. It is going to
be difficult to recover from this unfair stigma that Sikhs have tried so hard
to erase since 9/11.
For us...
"Forbidden Love" portrayed an extreme and rare outcome of an arranged marriage, but it brings to the surface a significant problem in our community, marriage. Many Sikh parents are unprepared when their children reach the marrying age. They do not know how to approach the children on the topic. Our young adults often become confused and feel trapped when it comes to marriage. They are faced with conflicting ideas of marriage, love versus arranged. With little or no preparation from their parents, they feel trapped. Where do they turn to? Gurdwaras offer no help. So they become depressed, they get married only to end up in divorce, they marry non-Sikhs, they give up Sikhism altogether, or some even commit suicide. This is a serious problem. The Sikh community has to make a real effort to help our youngsters and not stay silent on the problem. This is everyone's problem.