New Delhi: A Muslim teenager who fell in love with a Hindu student on the internet has fled her home in Britain against her parents' wishes and married him in India.
The clandestine affair between Subia Gaur, 18, and her boyfriend Ashwini Gupta, 22, has provoked intense media interest in the subcontinent and captured the imagination of the Indian public, who turned up in their hundreds to watch the ceremony.
The traditional Hindu wedding, which took place in Gupta's home town of Ghaziabad, near Delhi, on Monday, was broadcast on television throughout India.
Subia, from Plaistow, east London, met her man three years ago in an internet chatroom. They exchanged photographs, began talking secretly through the night and fell in love.
The relationship was conducted in secrecy for many months before Subia travelled to India to meet Gupta for the first time, on the pretence of visiting her grandparents in Bombay.
"I knew the first time I met Ashwini in person that he was the one I was going to marry," she said from her new home in India. "It is hard for people to understand what we have been through. My family have put a lot of pressure on me ... but I had to be with the man that I love.
"Religion doesn't matter. I am Muslim and he is Hindu. I am not converting and he doesn't want me to. Ashwini and his family have accepted me for who I am."
When Subia's family discovered the relationship while she was studying for her A-Levels at a sixth-form college, she claims they pressed her into ending it. They had planned an arranged wedding for her with a Muslim. But Subia defied them and flew secretly last month to Delhi. Her mother, discovering she had gone, took a flight the next day to persuade her to return home.
They were given police protection after claiming that they received threats from her family, an allegation they have denied. In turn, Subia's family told police she had been abducted.
"I knew they would never accept Ashwini so I decided to go to India," she said. "We thought if we got married then they wouldn't be able to take me back.
"I was a normal 18-year-old Londoner before this. I never wanted the attention that I have received. I couldn't believe 1,000 people turned up uninvited to the wedding because they saw our story on the news. But if there is someone else in my position I hope my story gives them the courage to follow their heart."
Subia's father, Abdul, 46, a shop manager, fainted at his home in Newham, east London, when he was interviewed about his daughter's fate. He believed she had been "brainwashed".
