Man Kidnapped From Friend's Wedding, Forced To Marry Stranger At Gunpoint

An Indian man was kidnapped at a friend’s wedding and forced to marry a woman at gunpoint that he’d never met before.

Bokaro Steel Plant engineer Vinod Kumar can be seen weeping in the forced wedding images from the viral video that swept through social media this week. He was attending the wedding of a friend in the Nalanda district of north east India’s Bihar state near Patna when a group of men kidnapped him at gunpoint. The forced marriage practice, Pakadua Vivah, is a tradition specific to the Bihar region and is typically performed by poor families seeking a suitable groom who cannot afford a dowry, NDTV reports.

Videos show women in attendance at the forced marriage even wiping the tears from the 29-year-old man’s face during the ceremony with their saris. “We are only performing your wedding, not hanging you. Why are you crying loudly? Shut up,” several relatives of the bride can be heard saying in the video.

Kumar said the family of the girl he’d never met “befriended” him at the wedding before hauling him outside and "thrashing" him. The chaotic wedding scene in the video shows a bedraggled Kumar being tossed around and forced to wear ceremonial clothing.

“They [the girl's family] befriended me during the wedding and asked me to step out,” Kumar told local news outlets. “They kidnapped me and took me to a home where I was forced to put vermillion in the hair of a girl. I had never seen her and I don't know who she is.”

Kumar initially wasn’t cooperating with the forced nuptials but several members of the bride-to-be’s family intermittently put guns to his head until the ceremony was over. Bihar police say they are investigating the case.