NEW DELHI: A month ago, Bengaluru police detained Iqra Jewani, a 19-year-old Pakistani woman, for entering India through illegal channels and living in Bengaluru for many months.

On Feb 20, the woman was repatriated to Pakistan and reunited with her parents, The Wire said.

Iqra Jewani had travelled across two countries _ the United Arab Emirates and Nepal _ to reach India. Iqra wanted to meet a man she had met online in an open game room of Ludo, a gaming website, and had eventually fallen in love with.

Bengaluru police, quoted by The Wire, say Iqra was kept at a women’s shelter home in the city for a month. There, the police say, she explained her situation and was given a choice to either stay back or return to her parents. She chose the latter, say police.

However, The Indian Express has reported that she expressed a desire to stay back in India. The report also notes that the couple are still in love, in addition to stressing on Iqra’s willingness to stay, and does not mention the alleged duping that Iqra had been a victim of.

Iqra’s is perhaps one of the very few cases where a person from Pakistan has been repatriated in less than a month. This, sources in both the Indian police and its Pakistani counterpart claim, was possible only because authorities “didn’t let the case be highlighted in the media more than required”.

“After the initial news, we didn’t share much information about her whereabouts and let diplomacy play its role. Once confirmed that the girl had genuinely travelled to India for love, we decided to not pursue the case any further,” a senior police officer told The Wire.

Iqra, a Class 12 student from Hyderabad in Pakistan, allegedly met Mulayam Singh Yadav on the online gaming portal last year. Her father, Muhammad Sohail Jewani, has been quoted as saying the young student did not have a phone of her own and would play on her mother’s phone. Iqra is the only daughter of the family, born after three sons, her father says.

Goes missing

On Sept 19 last year, as Iqra went missing from home, her parents immediately filed a missing persons’ complaint with the police. “At about 8 am, Iqra had gone to F.G. College, Cantonment [in Hyderabad, Sindh] for classes as usual.

She would usually return home by noon but on Sept 19, when she did not return, I went to the college and I was told my daughter had not gone to college that day,” Jewani states in his complaint. This complaint was soon handed over to the Federal Investigation Agency, which tracked her down to India.

After Iqra went missing, her family petitioned both the Pakistani and Indian governments seeking her immediate release.

Iqra had allegedly first travelled to Karachi and from there to Dubai and eventually to Nepal. From Nepal, she entered India and eventually settled with Mulayam, who, she claimed, had introduced himself as Sameer Ansari to her.

A few days after Iqra reached Bengaluru, she contacted her mother and said she was married to a man named Sameer and was living in India.

“We could not make sense of what was happening. We tried convincing her that she should return to Pakistan and we would find a legal way to get the two married. But before we could convince her, the police arrested her and the man,” the father told The Wire.

He maintains that his daughter was enticed into taking such a drastic step and that Mulayam had hidden his identity since day one. “In one of her phone calls, Iqra had told her mother that Mulayam would lock her in the house before leaving for work,” he had told The Wire in one of the first conversations with this reporter after Iqra’s detention in Bengaluru.

The Bengaluru police claimed that Iqra’s repeated WhatsApp calls to her mother in Pakistan first alerted them about her illegal stay in India. The police have, however, not clarified how and why were her WhatsApp calls intercepted.

According to police, the intelligence agencies were also involved in the interception process. The Wire was not able to establish contact with Iqra and hence, neither the claims by police nor by her father could be independently confirmed.

On Monday (Feb 20), Iqra, along with the Indian police, crossed the Wagah border and she was handed over to Pakistani officials. On the completion of formalities, she was reunited with her family.

Published in Dawn, February 22th, 2023