DELHI, India: Gulzar Khan entered India from Pakistan illegally in 2011, married his lover and hid his real identity from her for the next eight years, until he was arrested.
The love story revolving around a Christian male from Pakistan and the Muslim Woman in India was another episode in the India-Pakistan online romance. Now Gulzar Khan is waiting to hear if he will be deported back to Pakistan for illegally entering into India years back.
Amidst consistent tense relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, successful cross-border love stories between Indians and Pakistanis are rare. The two nations have fought three wars since they became independent in 1947. The tense relations make it hard for people to get visas to travel to see each other.
Several Pakistani and Indians have faced trouble after illegally crossing the Indo-Pak border for love. In recent years, many couples whose stories got media attention have attributed their meeting to the internet.
Interestingly, Gulzar Khan-Daulat Bi love story started with a wrong call. Mr Khan is from Sialkot district of Pakistan’s Punjab province while Ms Bi is from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is to mention here that there is a Punjab state in India as well, as the region was divided during 1947 Partition.
Khan, who was at that time working as a painter in Saudi Arabia, says he was trying to call a former colleague in India in 2009. When he couldn’t make a contact, he tried changing a digit here and there, thinking he might have jotted down a wrong number.
“One of those random numbers connected him with me,” says Ms Bi. According to her, she was a little apprehensive about talking to a stranger. But Khan persisted.
Mr Khan says that one the very first call, he told Ms Bi that he was from Punjab, but that he didn’t clarify that he meant the one in Pakistan. He also did not make it known to Ms Bi that he was a Christian. For years, even after their marriage, Ms Bi assumed he was a Muslim like her.
Over the next two years, Khan and Ms Bi spoke regularly on the phone.
Ms Bi was a widow with a child. She says her relatives and even neighbours would taunt her for talking to a stranger. “I used to tell him that it’s better that I die,” Ms Dolat Bi says. But, she says, Khan promised to come and marry her.
According to Mr Khan, he made several unsuccessful attempts to get a valid visa from the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia. Finally, he decided to impersonate an Indian citizen. He told the authorities that he had lost his passport and that he was an Indian and wanted to return to home country. He showed the authorities an identity card which had a black-and-white photo of an Indian man who looked similar to him.
Khan was detained, however, he was issued an emergency certificate and deported to India. He landed in India’s Hyderabad city in January 2011 and within weeks, the couple married and moved to Ms Bi’s village in Nandyal district in Andhra Pradesh.
Upon Khan’s arrival, the local police interrogated him but no case was registered.
For the next eight years, the two lived together and had four more children, with Mr Khan making a living as a painter. He applied and got an Aadhaar biometric card and other identity documents.
According to Mr Khan, he completely cut ties with his family in Pakistan during that time. His uncle even visited the Kingdom to find out what happened to him.
“We thought he may have had an accident,” Khan’s sister Sheela Lal, who lives in the Pakistan’s Rawalpindi city, told BBC Urdu.
“As I lived with my new family, I started considering myself an Indian,” Mr Khan says. But soon, he says, memories of home returned and he decided to visit Pakistan again.
Their fate took a turn in 2019 when he was arrested at a railway station in the neighbouring Indian state of Telangana while trying to leave India with Ms Bi and their children. Khan was charged with illegal entry and procuring forged documents.
According to media reports, Indian intelligence agencies had tracked calls made by Mr Khan to Pakistan.
It was when Ms Bi finally came to know that Mr Khan was a Christian from Pakistan. “I fought with the police, saying that he is from Punjab,” she said. “Then they told me that there is a Punjab in Pakistan too, and he is from there.” The disclosure initially shocked Ms Bi.
Mr Khan was arrested and as local court granted him bail in 2020 and a case on whether he should be deported is in the court.
Ms Bi and Mr Khan say they want to live together.
In February 2022, Mr Khan was arrested again after the Telangana government issued an order to detain what they described as “illegal migrants” in the state. The state’s high court then ordered that he be released until his deportation case was decided.
Khan doesn’t deny the charges. He acknowledges that he is a Pakistani citizen who pretended to be an Indian.
Now the couple is waiting for the court’s verdict to find out if they can stay together, either in India or Pakistan.
“I just hope it all works out,” Ms Bi says.
