Amanpreet Kaur keeps feeling her stomach every few minutes, to check. “I am scared something may happen to the baby,” says the 22-year-old, admitted to Gidderbaha Civil Hospital in Punjab’s Muktsar district.

It’s five days since she and her baby survived an assault by her family, with Amanpreet hiding in the water and holding on to a plant for half-an-hour to float, after being thrown into a canal. It’s been three years since she and Satnam Singh got married, two years since they went to court to get police protection, and several months since the couple dropped their guard, finally feeling “safe”.

All that was washed away on September 7 morning.

Amanpreet is frail, her thin frame occupying barely a corner of the hospital bed, her eyes tired and wary. Satnam, 30, his head bandaged, a cut running through his hand from the attack on him, sits beside her.

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Amanpreet at Gidderbaha Civil Hospital.

At the “waddi nehr (Rajasthan Feeder Canal)”, Amanpreet says: “My father and cousins Sukhpreet and Lovepreet looked around to ensure that no one was watching. Then, they pushed me into the water. My father saw me going under. My cousin said, ‘Gai (she is gone), let’s go’.”

Amanpreet recalls thrashing about and getting hold of a wild plant. “I clung to it and kept hiding. Had they seen me alive, they wouldn’t have spared me. I was in the water for 20-25 minutes. I don’t know how to swim, I kept going under. I was more worried for my baby,” she says.

After they were gone, she crawled out, slipping multiple times as she climbed up. “Finally I saw a man and asked for his phone. He said he could not make outgoing calls, but went and informed the sarpanch of Middukhera. The sarpanch called the police and an ambulance,” says Amanpreet.

She believes it is her baby — she is five months pregnant — that provoked this attack by her Jat Sikh family, who never reconciled to her marrying Satnam, a “Mazhabi Sikh (a Dalit convert)”.

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Police have booked six men on charges of attempt to murder and kidnapping – Amanpreet’s father Baljeet Singh, her younger brother Noorpreet, her cousins Lovepreet, Sukhpreet and Novalpreet, and an alleged accomplice, Lovesh. While Novalpreet is under arrest, the others are “absconding”, says Muktsar SSP Abhimanyu Rana.

‘Never touched drugs’

Amanpreet and Satnam belong to Karaiwala of Muktsar, their houses on either ends of the village. She says they fell in love five years ago. “First, he became my friend, then best friend, and soon I realised I loved him. The biggest reason was he never touched any nasha (intoxicant),” Amanpreet says, adding that one of her own brothers is an addict.

When she told her family about Satnam, Amanpreet says, “My parents got my name struck off from school after Class 10 and forced me to stay at home. I cleared 12th through correspondence. My father made it clear that he would never let me be with Satnam.”

They got married in secret in a temple in Muktsar on December 1, 2023, Satnam says. “We lived at our respective homes separately for some months. Then, in August 2024, we moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeking police protection against Amanpreet’s family as we feared for our lives.”

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Amanpreet told police she wanted to live with Satnam. “Her family said she had died for them… We then started living in Chandigarh,” says Satnam.

Satnam worked as a security guard, and Amanpreet took up a job as a saleswoman at a store.

In November 2024, they returned to the village after facing health and financial issues in Chandigarh, Satnam says. The High Court order and police’s warning to Amanpreet’s family to stay away from the couple reassured them.

Gidderbaha DSP Jatinder Singh says: “On September 7, 2024, the two recorded a statement before police saying they don’t face any threat now, don’t need gunmen, and don’t want any further proceedings on their HC writ… Everything had been peaceful for nearly two years.”

The nightmare returns

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Amanpreet thought the worst was over. Then, on the night of September 6, around 9 pm, just as they were sitting for dinner, she says, Noorpreet, Novalpreet, Lovepreet, Sukhpreet and Lovesh stormed into Satnam’s house with rods and weapons. “They started assaulting my husband. They were ready to shoot us. My mother-in-law intervened, and she was also thrashed. They dragged me by the hair and forced me into a car.”

Amanpreet says they drove to her house, where her father Baljeet got into the vehicle. They pressed her to submit a statement against Satnam, saying he consumed drugs and beat her, and that she wanted a divorce. Amanpreet refused.

“My father tried to strangle me, but one cousin said don’t kill her this way. Then they took a U-turn and took me to Malout, to an uncle’s house.” They stayed for the night there, she says. “In the morning, around 7 am, they drove me to the canal. They said, ‘There’s no point keeping her alive, she will not change her statement’.” The three got out, grabbed her and threw her into the water, she says.

Karaiwala village sarpanch Gurjit Singh says police called him the night Amanpreet was taken away. “But I had already slept.” Amanpreet’s family might have done what they did in “anger”, Gurjit adds. “Villagers told me the family was provoked by Satnam, that he went to their house drunk and shouted: ‘Tussi mama bannan waale ho (You are going to become an uncle)’.”

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Satnam denies this. “In two years, I never went to their house. Why would I go now?”

Amanpreet says as recently as Raksha Bandhan on August 28, her father called her up, asking her to come home and tie Rakhi to her brothers. She was happy, she says… “I am the only daughter in the family.”

Satnam stopped her from going. “He felt something was fishy,” Amanpreet shudders. “How can you call such a man a father who did not think about his daughter’s unborn child? Wasn’t he happy when my brother and I were born?”