PESHAWAR: A woman has moved the Peshawar High Court for relief accusing her uncle and cousin of hampering her marriage by invoking a local customary practice, ghag, under which a man can lay claim to a woman for purpose of marriage.

Nayab Gohar, 29, requested the court by a petition to help her marry of her own free will and without any intervention by the two suspects, including Abid Saleem and his father, Misal Khan.

On the court’s order, the local police produced the suspects before a bench comprising Chief Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Ikramullah Khan.

The two requested the court to allow them time for hiring a lawyer. The bench accepted their request and adjourned hearing into the case.

Mohammad Essa, lawyer for the petitioner, said his client belonged to a respectable family and in 1993 when she was six, her marriage with cousin Abid Saleem was pledged, but no engagement or nikkah was performed.

He said in 2007, Abid Saleem abducted another woman and married her and that from whom, he had four children.

The lawyer said after few years of that marriage, Abid with the connivance of his father sent jirgas to his client’s house with the proposal of marriage with her but the proposal was rejected by her exercising the ‘option of puberty’.

He said the petitioner’s denial infuriated Abid, who tried on July 2, 2011, to take her away by force but on failure, he resorted to firing gunshots at her father, Gohar Ali.

The lawyer said an FIR was registered at the Peshawar’s Kharakai police station in that regard.

He said due to the constant threats by the suspects, the petitioner had to abandon her studies at grade 6 and had to take admission in a Peshawar seminary.

The lawyer said for the last more than one and a half decades, the petitioner had been mostly confined to her house.

He said she later filed an application under Section 22-A of the Code of Criminal Procedure with a local court, which ordered the registration of an FIR under the KP Elimination of Ghag Act, 2013, against the suspects.

The lawyer however said suspect Abid was granted bail by a court on Dec 31, 2016, while his father was granted a pre-arrest bail on Mar 13, 2017.

He said the local police had failed to protect his client from the suspects, who had become a constant hurdle in the way of her contracting marriage with a person of her choice.

The Elimination of Ghag Act, 2013, defines ghag as: “A custom, usage, tradition or practice whereby a person forcibly demands or claims the hand of a woman, without her own or her parents’ or wali’s will and free consent, by making an open declaration either by words spoken or written or by visible representation or by an imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, in a locality or before public in general that the woman shall stand engaged to him or any other particular man and that no other man shall make a marriage proposal to her or marry her, threatening her parents and other relatives to refrain from giving her hand in marriage to any other person, and shall also include obstructing the marriage of such woman in any other manner pursuant to such declaration.”

Published in Dawn, April 8th, 2017