GUWAHATI: An Assam woman’s love affair and elopement with a young man from Bangladesh has ended in arrest. Bangladeshi authorities picked her up on Tuesday for entering the country without valid travel documents.
The arrest came days after 21-year-old Mousumi Das, a final-year college student from Karimganj in southern Assam’s Barak Valley, converted to Islam and married Numan Badshah of Dhaka. She met Badshah at a recent trade expo in Karimganj and fell in love with him.
After she went missing on March 12, her parents lodged a kidnapping case. That she was in Bangladesh emerged when videos of her went viral on social media.
In a video, she is clad in a burqa. In another, she is heard saying she was not kidnapped but had eloped with Badshah.
Karimganj police said the duo had entered Bangladesh via Tripura.
“Badshah came to India on a business visa. He works with a company that deals in sarees. There was a trade expo in Karimganj where she met him,” Karimganj Superintendent of Police, Gaurav Upadhyay, told The New Indian Express. He said Bangladesh police had taken Mousumi into custody and was to have been produced before a magistrate on Wednesday.
“There are two possibilities. She might be given a sentence under their law for illegal entry. The Indian high commissioner in Bangladesh may seek consular access to her. If it is granted, the high commission will record her statement and get her nationality verified. Once that is done, she will be repatriated,” Upadhay said.
“The second possibility, which I don’t think is realistic, is that she will be pushed back. Things have gone beyond the control of the police. They are now between two countries.” The incident has set tongues wagging that this is a case of “love jihad”.