CHENNAI: Every single day, across India, married women suffer. Not all — that should go without saying. But many. Many experience emotional abuse, as well as financial constraints and restrictions on time, energy and freedom of choice. Some experience physical violence.
Some are raped (but marital rape is not illegal). Some are murdered, either outright or in a phenomenon known as “dowry deaths”, involving mysterious kitchen incidents — or else by suicide as a result of an inescapable situation.
The abuse may come from spouses, in-laws, and in certain cases their own families of origin. It is statistically proven that the vast majority of incidents of violence against women occurs within the household. Of these, most are unreported. A small fraction makes the headlines, but very rarely creates public outcry, although violence from a stranger or a lover from a minority background may be sensationalised in order to enable further oppression.
For many years now, on an organised and formal level, movements that claim that men are the true victims of Indian marriage (an institution that remains strictly heterosexual at this time) have sought to skew the facts and refute the statistics.
Misogynists, who self-identify as “men’s rights activists” and may be from any gender, assert that men are the ones being abused in large numbers — by their wives, ex-wives and in-laws. The term “genocide” — which will never be used to describe the situation of the Palestinian people, for instance, because there’s a strong overlap between nationalists, bigots and MRAs — is bandied about.
This month, they have found a martyr in Atul Subhash, a Bengaluru man who died by suicide, leaving written materials and a video accusing his ex-wife Nikita Singhiana and her family of harassment.
He also named a sessions court judge who he claimed laughed at his plight. Singhiana, her mother and brother have been taken into custody and the case will be investigated. Without diminishing Subhash’s tragic action and what may have driven him to it, it remains categorically inaccurate to suggest that his demise is indicative of sociocultural trends at large.
That isn’t the position held by an army of misogynists, of course. The case has incited a slew of incendiary, hate-filled social media posts advocating for the abuse of women.
There have been laments about the “need” for scheduled beatings, social restrictions, reproductive manipulation, curtailing of income and even the legalisation of dowry — which is interesting, because much lobbying from these quarters is around opposing the misuse of anti-dowry laws like Section 498A IPC.
Men posting such openly misogynistic fantasies do so with impunity, because arranged marriage has favoured their behaviour for centuries. Women who share these beliefs do so because they too feel rewarded or protected by patriarchy.
If Indian men truly felt oppressed by marriage, they would not marry at all — women in South Korea and the USA who are part of the 4B movement are doing just that, after all.
If Indian misogynists cared about mental health issues, their approach would be vastly different, and probably involve learning from care-based activism. But the only intention behind their rallying is the subjugation of women. The continued subjugation of women, that is.