She sold her jewelry and borrowed money from friends to purchase airline tickets to Dubai and then on to Kathmandu, where she crossed the border into India, according to her uncle, who revealed the intriguing tale of how a shy teenage Pakistani girl traveled alone to Bengaluru to meet and marry an Indian man.
Iqra Jeevani, the girl, was found last month in Bangalore, where she was sharing a home with Mulayam Singh Yadav, a jailed Hindu. At the Wagah border, she was turned over to Pakistani officials on February 26.
They got married after falling in love and meeting each other online. After that, she traveled to Nepal a few months ago, where they were later wedded.
Iqra reportedly returned home, according to unnamed family sources in Pakistan’s Sindh province, after her father, uncle, and mother traveled to Lahore to pick her up after Indian officials turned her over to their Pakistani counterparts.
Iqra went AWOL after leaving for college in September of last year, which is when the intriguing tale began.
Although attempts to reach Iqra were unsuccessful, her father, Sohail Jeewani, declared that the issue was now final.
According to a family insider, the family has not yet fully recovered from the shock of what has happened over the past four months.
Questions persist about how the 16-year-old Iqra got from Karachi to Dubai, then to Kathmandu, and finally to India.
Ansari in actuality was 26-year-old Mulayam Singh Yadav, a security guard in Bengaluru whom Iqra met while playing online Ludo games.
Iqra planned to be brought into Bengaluru via the India-Nepal border, where Yadav, from Uttar Pradesh, had arranged to meet her and take her to his home. She sold her jewelry and borrowed money from her college friends to pay for her flights to Dubai and then to Kathmandu.
Iqra traveled to Dubai and then Kathmandu because she couldn’t get a visa for India, according to her uncle Afzal Jeewani.
Iqra was only found by the Indian police after neighbors in the neighborhood where Yadav took her reported seeing her praying to the police, according to him.
He also stated that Iqra had been found by Indian police shortly after the complaint, but they had kept her in a shelter home while they questioned her about how she entered India.
Iqra’s name was changed to Rava by Yadav, and she subsequently filed for an Indian passport. Yadav even had an Aadhaar card made for her.
He claimed that ever since she went back to Pakistan, the girl had been pleading for pardon. When the two met on social media while playing online Ludo games, he alleged that the Indian man had deceived his cousin by pretending to be a Muslim boy.
Iqra realized her error after arriving in Bengaluru and meeting Yadav, according to the Jeewani family, which owns a company in Hyderabad City in the southern Sindh Province. She then began contacting her mother on WhatsApp to inform her of everything, the family said.
According to a senior police official, the family told them about the call and they made contact with the Pakistani foreign office via the necessary channels. The Pakistani foreign office then made contact with their Indian counterparts to assist in locating and recovering the girl.
Iqra’s case was not a huge surprise to Dr. Fatima Sehgal, a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction and the effects of social media, according to PTI. She said this is the power of online friendships.
According to Fatima, when young person makes a friend who respects them, listens to them, and shows them affection, they begin to imagine a happy, romantic future with that person.
