It has been a long wait for Shahida. She was engaged to be married to Barmer’s Babu Bhai Sheikh back in 1992. But when she didn’t get a visa to relocate from Pakistan’s Hyderabad city to Rajasthan for several years, Sheikh moved on and in 1995 got married to a woman from Jaisalmer instead.
It was much later that Sheikh heard that Shahida was still waiting for him and told her family to get her married off. But Shahida was insistent. The two eventually got married in 2017 but the couple hasn’t been able to stay together because her request for an Indian visa is still pending, said 56-year-old Sheikh. Recently, he also approached Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Barmer, Kailash Choudhary, for help.
Choudhary, who is also the Union minister of state for agriculture and farmer welfare, said he has requested external affairs ministry officials to look into the case. “Soon, I will personally meet the external affairs minister to ensure the earliest relief to the couple,” the minister said, adding that he has asked Sheikh to submit a fresh visa application.
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Sheikh said he first heard that Shahida was still waiting for him in 2000 when he travelled to Pakistan. “I was shell-shocked as I had presumed that she would have moved on knowing that I had got married,” Sheikh said.
But Sheikh did not meet Shahida at that time and told his sister’s family to ask Shahida to get married as he was already married and had a child in India.
“I never thought that she would be waiting for me for so long even after I got married and had a child,” said Sheikh, a Jaisalmer-based farmer.
“When I told her family to get her married, they told me that she insisted on marrying him. So, I finally decided to marry her in 2017. Now I am waiting for her as her visa has not been approved,” he said.
Sheikh believes that his inability to marry Shahida was due to the frosty relations between India and Pakistan.
“In 2019 she has applied for an Indian visa and the file is stuck (at the Indian embassy in Islamabad) like our destiny”, Sheikh said.
“I am pleading to the authorities of two countries to take our case on humanitarian grounds and help us,” he said.
