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Sometimes love gets the better of us and leaves us in situations that we can never recover from. That is exactly what has happened to a young man from Balochistan. Family pressure and religious beliefs won against love, as the man lost more than just his chance to marry the girl he loved.
The young man named Abdul Baqi, who belonged to a religious and conservative family, suffered torture at the hands of his father and brothers. The reason? He decided to marry out of the family.
Baqi hailed from the Loralai district of Balochistan, while the girl he wanted to marry belonged to Loralai’s long reigning rival, Duki district. In the past, people of both the places have lingered enmity between them for decades and this case is a perfect example of how low they can actually go.
Baqi’s father, upon finding out that he wanted to marry of his own will, taught him a lesson no father or child would ever forget. Baqi’s eyes were gouged out by his own family so that he gets blind and cannot marry of his own will. “The man has lost both his eyes,” a police official from the area informed different news teams.
“They [father and brothers] locked my mother in another room and tied me up with a rope. Then they gouged my eyes out with a spoon and chopped them to pieces with a knife,” said Abdul Baqi, the man who was blinded by his own family. “I liked a girl from Duki. My father and brothers were not happy with my choice. They often used to tell me that they will never allow me to marry a girl who keeps chatting on the mobile phone with me. They told me that they were ‘mullas’ (religious men) and cannot bear such a relation.”
A man gouged out his youngest son’s eyes for wanting to marry a girl against his family’s wishes in Loralai, Balochistan. The night before Abdul Baqi of Nasirabad village, told his family he wanted to marry a girl of his choice and asked them to take a proposal to her family.
— *Dr Barkat SOOMRO* (@DrBarkatSoomro) May 14, 2018
Baqi’s comments also shed light on the hindered thinking of his family, as one of the reasons they gave for not letting him marry of his choice was that his future wife had a cell phone and used to talk to him for long hours. Instead of hurting the girl after she joined his family, they decided to teach their own son a lesson that the whole world will think about.
Abdul Baqi was then rushed to Quetta, where no hospital could provide him assistance due to unavailability of an eye specialist. One of Baqi’s brother has appealed to the government to provide him with medical assistance, as his family was too poor (and insane) to afford his medical bills.
