Indian man forced to marry woman at gunpoint, police say investigation ongoing

A 29-year-old man from Bihar, India was reportedly kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to marry a woman he’d never met.

Authorities said they were looking into the kidnapping of Vinod Kumar after videos of the nuptials surfaced online Friday. A YouTube video shows Kumar being manhandled and forced to dress for the wedding as he pleads for freedom throughout the ceremony.

“We are only performing your wedding, not hanging you,” a man can he heard saying in the video as Kumar begs to be released.

Kumar was quoted by local media saying that the bride’s family pointed a gun at him after they met at a mutual friend’s wedding and ordered him to marry her. The practice of forced marriage is known as ‘Pakadua Vivah.’

“We are looking into a complaint by Vinod Kumar’s family and will take action once investigations are over,” senior police official Manu Maharaj told NDTV on Friday.

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Since the incident, Kumar has reportedly escaped and returned to his home in neighbouring Jharkhand state.

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Local social scientist Saibal Gupta said that such marriages enjoy widespread acceptance and, given the stigma of divorce, tend to stand.

“The frequency of such kidnappings has come down, but certainly not stopped. Poverty is still rampant,” he told Agence France-Presse.

Official figures show police received nearly 3,000 complaints of groom kidnapping in 2016. None of the marriages were annulled.

This practice is more common in the poorest areas of India, such as Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. In these regions, families are often too poor to afford dowries, a marital tradition of giving gifts that is still widely expected in India.

Bihar has a long-held reputation for lawlessness and gang violence, with families thought to enlist organized crime figures to help them carry out abductions and forced marriages.

-With files from Agence-France Presse.