It was, as Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said, a meeting of two mothers. Uzma Ahmed wiped the tears from her eyes as she hugged her mother. And then, as her eyes welled up again, she bent down to pick up her three-year-old daughter.
Delhi resident Uzma, back home on Thursday after a harrowing time in Pakistan, broke down often at an interaction with the media here. Forced to marry a Pakistani national identified as Tahir Ali, she managed to return to India after the Islamabad High Court allowed her to leave Pakistan, forcing Ali, who had taken away her immigration papers, to return them to her.
She recounted a tale of horror, of being forced to live in a "Taliban-like region" in Pakistan, which she described as a "well of death". She had met Ali in Malaysia, and the two had fallen in love. She left for Pakistan with him sometime in the beginning of May, she said.
My plan of going to Pakistan was for leisure. I had planned to return by 10 or 12 May. But, it wasn’t like that at all when I reached there. You can call it a kidnapping situation. After we crossed the Wagah Border, nothing felt rightUzma Ahmed
Emotionally overwhelmed, she often cried while narrating her story at the briefing, in which minister Sushma Swaraj was also present. Uzma said she was an "adopted child", but the government made her feel like she was "India's daughter".
Swaraj, while recalling the episode, said Uzma was so distressed that she told high commission officials she would commit suicide if she was not rescued.
"She came to the mission counter, and she had such a terrified look on her face that we immediately took her inside and gave her all support," India's Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan JP Singh said.
The Islamabad High Court on Wednesday allowed her to return to India after she appealed to the court to direct Ali to return her documents.
Swaraj also thanked the government and judiciary of Pakistan for facilitating Ahmed’s return to India. Swaraj’s gesture comes amid a deepening diplomatic crisis between New Delhi and Islamabad, over a death sentence awarded to Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav.
Video Editor: Ashutosh Bhardwaj
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