Family marries off 15-year-old to save honour after bride runs away

May 1, 2007, 4:35 GMT

Kathmandu - A family in central Nepal married off their child to save their family honour after the girl's older sister ran away on her wedding day, media reports said Tuesday.

The groom, Ram Kumar Dahal, 19, arrived for the marriage ceremony Monday at a temple in Banepa, about 30 kilometres east of Kathmandu, only to find that his fiancee and girlfriend of five years, Parbati Dulal, had run away without a word to anyone, the Annapurna Post reported.

Her 15-year-old sister, Chandrabati, then took her place.

'We asked our younger daughter to marry the man to save our honour,' the Post quoted the bride's father, Chakra Bahadur Dulal, as saying.

The bride's parents said the two families had agreed to the marriage between Parbati Dulal and Ram Kumar on the couple's insistence and did not know why their daughter had run away.

'On Sunday, Parbati was making a traditional wedding garland, saying her husband was really going to like it, but she ran away just before the groom came to take her away,' Chakra Bahadur Dulal said.

The groom also found himself clueless as to why his fiancee fled because she had agreed to the marriage after five years of dating.

Under Nepalese law, it is illegal to marry girls under 18 and the family soon found themselves in conflict with Maoist former rebels who arrived at the temple to stop the marriage to Chandrabati.

The teenager told the Maoist cadres it was none of their businesses to interfere in someone else's life and they failed to stop the ceremony, the newspaper said.