Deepika Bhardwaj: The woman who fights for men's rights in India

9IrVFQoly6yMi6 · 2018-06-29T10:11:03+00:00

Judges across India have warned against its misuse and the Delhi Commission for Women has said that 53.2% of the rape cases filed between April 2013 and July 2014 were found to be false.

tenchineuro · 2018-06-29T17:03:42+00:00

In India, where crimes against women are rampant, a female activist and documentary filmmaker stands out for being a rare voice for abused men. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi profiles Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj as part of a series on the Asian women likely to make the news in 2017.

India regularly gets hauled over the coals for its shabby treatment of women. And rightly so.

Every 15 minutes a rape is recorded, every five minutes an incident of domestic violence is reported, a bride is killed for dowry every 69 minutes and every year hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are aborted and infant girls are killed, leading to an appallingly skewed gender ratio. Girls and women also have to battle lifelong discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect.

I dunno if Geeta Pandey is fighting for men's rights or not, the BBC's so busy with the obligatory women are the bigger victims of everything narrative that they've only mentioned Geeta one in passing in the first 3 paragraphs.

India introduced Section 498A in 1983 after a spate of dowry deaths in Delhi and elsewhere in the country. There were daily reports of new brides being burnt to death by their husbands and in-laws and the murders were often passed off as "kitchen accidents". Angry protests by female MPs and activists forced parliament to bring in the law.

...

"It was a law made with very noble intentions," agrees Ms Bhardwaj. "But a law that was made to save lives, has taken many lives."

Ms Bhardwaj is not alone in her criticism. Over the years, Section 498A has acquired the reputation of being the "most abused law in the history of Indian jurisprudence".

As the law prescribes the immediate arrest of those named in a complaint, 2.7 million people, including 650,000 women and 7,700 children, were arrested between 1998 and 2015. The accused in some of the cases were as young as two years old and, in a particularly bizarre case, a two-month-old baby was hauled into a police station.

Perturbed by such reports, in July 2014, the Supreme Court ordered the police to follow a nine-point checklist before arresting anyone on a dowry complaint.

Ms Bhardwaj, a former journalist, says she began researching the subject in 2012 after "a very personal experience".

"In 2011, a cousin's marriage fell apart within three months and his wife accused him and our entire family of beating her and demanding dowry from her. She filed a false case against us. I was also named as an accused, as someone who beat her and tortured her regularly," she says.

Ms Bhardwaj says her family paid "a large sum of money" to buy peace, but "even though the case got over, I was not at peace".

"The law has become a tool for extreme blackmail and extortion," she says.

This kind of thing happens everywhere, I do not believe that this is an unintended consequence, this was probably the intent of the way the law was written. Anyone want to bet that India's feminists took a part in drafting this law?

The3ofthe40 · 2018-06-29T22:31:53+00:00

Proof of nawalt. This woman is a saviour, this is the female version of Jesus, but better than Jesus.

TheImpossible1 · 2018-06-29T18:49:08+00:00

Any women on our side should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

Title	Deepika Bhardwaj: The woman who fights for men's rights in India
Author	perplexedm
Upvotes	62
Comments	10
Date	June 29, 2018 6:48 AM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/8ur22x/deepika_bhardwaj_the_woman_who_fights_for_mens/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/deepika-bhardwaj-the-woman-who-fights-for-mens.898795 https://theredarchive.com/post/898795

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