Agencies
NEW DELHI: Indian Sikh woman Kiran Bala, who came to Pakistani on Baisakhi pilgrimage but converted to Islam and married Muhammad Azam from Lahore on April 16, has been granted visa extension of six months by Pakistan.
The 31-year-old mother of three comes from Garhshankar in Hoshiarpur district in Punjab in India.
Her husband Narinder Singh, whom she married in 2005, died in 2013 and she became friends with Muhammad Azam on social media.
Azam worked in Saudi Arabi and reportedly paid for the woman’s trip to Pakistan even though she got the visa in the guise of pilgrimage to Sikh shrines in Pakistan.
Last week, she said she would never return to India and applied for visa extension in the Lahore High Court.
On the directions of the high court, Pakistan’s interior ministry on Monday granted her 6-month visa extension. Kiran Bala, whose new name is Amina Bibi, appeared before the ministry with her new husband and produced her passport and other documents.
She said she was happy to get visa extension and hoped to get permanent residency in Pakistan soon.
But she will have to wait for seven years to get Pakistani citizenship. She will have to apply visa extension every six months.
Kiran Bala has even lied to deny that she is the mother of three children – a daughter who is 12 and two boys who are eight and six. She showed this falsely on her passport to secure visa to Pakistan.
In this video below, she is even seen raising pro-Pakistan slogans with her husband and denying that she is a mother of three children.
Kiran Bala, a Hindu from New Delhi, had a love marriage with Narinder Singh – a Sikh – in 2005. After the marriage, she moved from Delhi to live with her Sikh in-laws in Punjab.
After the death of her husband, her in-laws tried to marry her to her deceased husband’s younger brother but he refused.
Kiran Bala says she was mistreated by her mother-in-law and that’s why she left them to marry Muhammand Azam.
Kiran Bala’s mother-in-law has said she had troubled relationship with the family after the death of her husband. The mother-in-law said Kiran Bala would lock herself in her room and have long chats with strangers on the phone. She also accused Kiran Bala of bringing a bad name to the family.
Her baptized Sikh father-in-law Tarsem Singh was instrumental in getting her visa for pilgrimage to Pakistan because of his connections in the Shriomani Gurdwara Parbhanadhak Committee (SGPC) which nominates pilgrims for Pakistan.
But once she reached Nankana Sahib in Pakistan with other Sikh pilgrims on April 12, she disappeared and took an auto to reach Lahore to meet her Muslim lover whom she married in a mosque in Lahore on April 16.
