22-year-old woman in Punjab’s Dinanagar town called off her wedding after she saw the groom arrive at the gurdwara in an intoxicated state, police said on Tuesday.
Sunita Singh was dressed in her bridal outfit, red salwar-kameez, when she spotted her groom as he approached the gurudwara where the ceremony was to be held on Sunday.
Jaspreet Singh, a truck driver, appeared high as he stumbled towards the Sikh temple in their village in Gurdaspar, close to the Pakistan border.
Sunita, whose father is a truck driver, said she would not marry a drug addict. Shocked parents of the groom tried to convince her that Jaspreet, a truck driver, had injured himself in the foot and couldn’t walk straight but Sunita stood firm.
The father of the bride, Kamal Singh, knew Jaspreet well as they drove on long routes in their trucks and had got his daughter engaged to him recently.
“But now he is proud of his daughter. He believes she has taken the right stand. How can he be happy if she isn’t?” the relative said.
Her ex-fiancee could not be tested for drug use at a local health centre because basic equipment was missing. Sunita refused to quit; at her insistence, he was taken to a private lab and tested positive for an addiction to opioid painkillers, a common constituent of the drug epidemic among young men in Punjab.
Sunita, who is a matriculate, has no regrets.
"When I learned that he (Jaspreet) was drugged, I decided I couldn't spend my life with him. In the long run, not only me, but my children would also bear the brunt of this," she said.
The local Red Cross de-addiction centre is now planning to award Sunita for her courage. "To be able to stand her ground in this way makes hers an eye-opener for several other women across the state," said Ramesh Mahajan, a Red Cross Official.
"Being the daughter of a truck-driver, she (Sunita) knows the perils of the drug problem and its vulnerabilities. Her father and entire family are proud of Sunita's decision," said a relative who did not want to be named.
Addiction has been a major problem in Punjab and has only been getting worse. With the exposé of a nexus between drug mafia, politicians and police, especially some high profile ministers and leaders of the previous regime, the issue assumed major proportions.
Captain Amarinder Singh of the Congress, who was elected Chief Minister, has formed a special task-force to combat the sale of drugs. The government claims close to 1,000 arrests in the last two months in this context.
