Myth Buster

How Dowry, Maintenance and Alimony is not allowing women to live with dignity

The true evil of Dowry

Ask anyone this question: What is dowry? Most would say it is the price paid by a woman or her family to get her to be accepted for marriage by a potential husband. Now there are several questions that are hidden in plain sight within this explanation.


If dowry is a recognized crime and everyone is supposed to know this, then what prevented the woman or her family to walk away from such an exchange, if it was indeed demanded? This is in view of the often lamented ‘fact’ that there are more boys on Indian soil than women. Which means that women have more choice and can afford to reject dowry seekers.  If women as such are being ‘objectified’ by the Indian male then it stands to reason that women are more in demand than men. In which case, it would be logical for men to pay dowry to women, since women have more choice and more bargaining power.


It must be told to all Indian parents that adult daughters in the family should not be seen as useless piece of furniture or cattle incapable of sustaining or earning for themselves. Dowry is the symptom of a mindset where people see an adult daughter as a piece of brainless entity who is always in need of regular maintenance and upkeep in the form of food, clothing and lodging.


Dowry is a bribe to any man who unwittingly accepts the responsibility to look after a certified life-long victim who has declared herself incapable of standing up for her own dignity. Therefore dowry is a crime in more ways than one and actually perpetrated by the giver.

There are a few glass items that society has ignored for too long. It is possible that these glass items are so transparent it was invisible or it is possible that it was so opaque that light of sensibility got refracted. It is also possible that people were so busy looking up at the ceiling that they neglected to see what is in front of them.


The glass cage

This is the self imprisonment of the female psyche into a state of victim-hood. How else can we explain the fact that many highly educated women with professional qualifications talk about being victims of dowry. Who is to blame here? The woman herself, or for the sake of convenience, her parents. These are the very same parents who poured hard earned money into her education. No parent across the world would educate a child on the assumption that the child would grow up and become financially dependent on them. Also, there is no educational syllabus in the world which tells women that they need to depend on others for their livelihood.


In the context of arranged marriages, why would Indian parents be so desperate to shower dowry on the groom to get rid of their daughters by marriage. Is it because they think that their daughters are incapable of living and earning for themselves. Or are they trying to gift-wrap some psychological, emotional or medical handicap?


Whatever the reason, this form of victim-hood, whether forced by parents or self assumed by many women, is a form of a glass cage which many women have come to carefully nurture, cherish and refuse to let go. This has serious implications for their own future and the future of the upcoming generations


The glass bowl
Once the idea of victim-hood has been strongly embedded either by herself or by her parents or through government sponsored programs, the woman somehow holds herself against her logical thought process and encourages herself to behave like a parasite on whoever she feels is responsible for her upkeep. She forgets that every individual of mature age is responsible for themselves. Many women who can logically plot the route and plan their logistics to lawyer’s offices and courts somehow just stop themselves short of plotting their the route to their own earned livelihood and dignified living. In this age of realized equality, any woman who she knows how to spend, also ought to know that she can also earn and not leech on the father or the husband, whether she is single, married or separated or divorced.


If we ask any female college student why she wants to pursue a higher education, she will tell you about her higher aspirations of work, livelihood, ambitions, service to society and so on. Why then do women seek maintenance when they get married and why then do women seek alimony when they want to get out of the marriage. Is this not an insult to all women who have made it on their own in the world? Is this not a gross disservice and insult to all the girls to grow up thinking it is their fate to ultimately financially depend on men? It is an irony that women activists who vociferously objected to the word ‘keep’ applied to women in a Supreme Court judgement maintain ominous silence on this ongoing onslaught on women’s dignity by the legal provisions of maintenance and alimony.


Maintenance at most can be justified on fixed short term basis only for disabled spouses who would have sustained the disability during the marriage.

Asset distribution at most can be justified as share of the combined savings of both partners during the subsistence of the marriage, but it is not a free-loading retirement benefit scheme and neither is it an incentive for divorce.

If these concepts of Dowry, Matrimonial Maintenance and Alimony are not uprooted and relegated to the documented past, there is a danger that even future generations of women will never realise true empowerment and dignity. I for one cannot stand by and allow my teenaged daughter to grow up and become a parasite on another man and kill her potential for survival and aspirations as envisaged by the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign. What about you? 

For a Hindi translation of above, click here

‘Combating Online Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call’ – A waste of a good coffee



‘Majority of women suffer online abuse says UN Report’; reads the early morning coffee news item. This is enough to make me want to go back to the safety of my sleep. But it is time again to unravel these mysterious statements by the UN.

The report goes on to talk about ‘cyber violence’ and further says that ‘India is one of the countries where reporting about cyber bullying is low’. Again and again we hear of these ‘unreported’ cases somehow being ‘reported’ perhaps telepathically from victim to UN report makers. Or does the UN also employ tarot cards and astrologers’ parrots to pick a number. More on that in a moment.   
Let’s take a break to refill the coffee mug. Things are about to get more interesting.

The report named ‘Combating Online Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call’. The quotes go on as such ‘only 35% women in India reported their victimization while a larger majority 46.7% had not. About 18.3% were not even aware that they had been victimized’ Now coming to the interesting part, which poses a few serious questions.

  1. How did they know the exact figure of 46.7% had not reported victimization when it was not reported? Are the UN reporters on some kind of medication that made them hallucinate?
  2. How did the UN know it was just 35% of women who reported abuse when they did not know how many actually faced the abuse? How does the UN know the actual number of women who are online? Is the UN secretly stalking these women? Does the UN realize it is a crime?
  3. How could 18.3% not even be aware that they had been victimized? Is this the online analogy of telling someone that they were sleep walking, or is it just a covert message being sent to women to get in touch with their ‘feelings’ about being abused?
  4. Where is the report on how many men face online abuse?
  5. Where is the report on how many men have ‘not reported’ their online abuse?
  6. Where the report on how many men are not even aware that they have been victimized by these UN reports?

The report goes on (..and on and on) to says that women in the age range of 18 to 24 are ‘uniquely likely’ to experience stalking and sexual harassment in addition to physical threats. The above statement can only be made by an unemployed astrologer desperate for some attention or it could be made by a very respectable body called the UN which has stopped being effective in curtailing real human issues and is now waging war against Men & Boys.

Seems like the UN is no longer a place where real humanitarian work takes place, nor does it stand for equality or justice anymore. This is evident from the end statement of the news report which reiterates the UN mandate as Sensitization, Safeguards and Sanctions- Sensitization of ‘feelings’ so that it can create  Safeguards against imaginary threats and impose Sanctions against about half of the human population. 

Addendum 1: For Your Information, UN please consider the following: https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/647450208452878336



Addendum 2: 

Fact-checking the UN: Is the Internet dangerous for women?

A Burning in Hyderabad

News reports started off saying that a kerosene-burning of a woman took place in the side lanes of the old city of Hyderabad. The accusation of the 30% burn victim is that she was attacked and burnt by her relatives. The woman is currently hospitalized and undergoing treatment. Police had taken custody of the accused and questioned. 
After investigation, other facts came to light. The relatives claimed that they were not involved in the incident. The burn victim claimed that she was working in Deloitte software company.  She claimed that the attack took place at 10pm in the night. During investigation, the police officials could not get any leads. At this stage a young man came forward to say that he was an eyewitness to the incident. But when the police interrogated him further, he claimed that the woman called him up at 9.30pm and told him that she was burnt and told him to give false witness of the incident.
Even her rescuer confirmed that he did not see anyone who could have set her on fire. On further investigation, police found out that she was not working for Deloitte. She already had 13 cheating cases on her. She even put false cases on many of her relatives and made them run around courts. An elderly relative explains how she put rape case against him, his wife, his deceased daughter and his two sons. When they were acquitted, she filed writ petition against their acquittal in the High Court. It is reported that she even put cases against people who refused to helped her and also against people who helped her! MBT party leader Azadullah Khan says that he himself, his brother, party workers and even a lawyer who helped her with bail were also implicated in fake harassment cases by this woman.
The news report concludes that at present, the police are investigating further into the case, but as of now it seems that the woman has allegedly has set herself on fire to implicate her government-employed relatives and extort money from them.

Marriage in the time of WCD, a Prenuptial Out-law

 


Marriage breakup in India these days takes lesser time than it takes to complete six balls in a cricket match. ‘Over’ says the Umpire in a cricket game; his decision is final, no appeals, no reviews. But in an Indian divorce, the real match begins for players of the game. Prenuptial agreements or contracts as seen in the Western world are supposed to minimize the litigation for the warring couples, and to ensure that no party uses divorce for the express purpose of financial profit. However, in India, it is a different power play altogether.

 
There have been several news reports informing the public that the Women & Child Development (WCD) Ministry is proposing the legitimization of pre-nuptial contracts in India. Sounds just like cricketing rules. Sounds fair and square? After all cricket is supposed to be a gentleman’s game overseen by gentlemen umpires. Some would say that’s patriarchal oppression of the stadium!  But if we allow the dust to settle and allow the playground to become visible once more, we will find that the WCD has no mandate to create rules of the marriage game on its own. Remember, in a past issue the WCD famously responded by saying “Protection of men is also not the mandate of Ministry of WCD”.
 
By definition any heterosexual Marriage involves the union of a man and a woman, then it can be said with reasonable authority that WCD has no mandate for drafting any law involving marriage. In reciprocation, and in all fairness, we the men of India recognize the fact that we do not have any mandate for marriages involving woman and woman. If at all WCD is burdening itself with heterosexual marriage laws, then a partner-body of Men and Child Development (MCD) Ministry must be immediately constituted to allow reason and logic also to be clinically injected into the draft. Provisionally, till the formation of an MCD, Men’s Rights Groups must be allowed to put in their representations to the law making body.
 
The WCD is a Ministry which has time and again shown itself to be anti-male for adults as well as children (witness the anti-male child remarks by the current Minister). If it is the official stated position of the WCD Ministry that “all violence is male generated” then logically speaking WCD should not entertain any sort of contact between men and women. So if Honorable Minister Maneka Gandhi’s views on males as generators of violence is to be taken at face value, then by proposing a prenuptial law then the WCD, by its own admission is directly contributing to the violence.
 
Besides any one-sided prenuptial law, being unrepresented by the side of men, is the same as a dowry demand, which is illegal & prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act.
 
Also like in the past, WCD is more suited to propose new laws and amendments for encouraging breakup and post-breakup scenarios like dowry cases, Domestic Violence Act which is applicable only for women and matters involving incentives for divorces for women, as opposed to Domestic Harmony law proposed by men’s rights groups. Therefore it can be said that till now as far as women and men are concerned, in the context of a family, the WCD has been working purely on divisive lines.
 
Marriage is a unifying concept, performed for the purpose of harmonious cohabitation and the growth of man, woman and children. Marriage is not a platform for unleashing male hatred, property division and making children the property of the State. The WCD, therefore having no experience or mandate or any intention of drafting unifying laws is uniquely disqualified from making proposals for the creation of any sort of draft outlines in any context remotely concerning marriage. We therefore summarily oppose any lab experimentation on the institution of marriage by any unscientific body. The WCD is advised to rediscover fire and reinvent the wheel & also clean itself of misandry before it even thinks of reformulating the rules of man-woman relationship of marriage. In case the government and public still think that a law on prenuptials are required, then we suggest that WCD and Mens Rights Organizations sign a prenuptial agreement first to sit together and draft a prenuptial law. Hows that for equality?

A Liposuction of Maintenance & Alimony Laws

Additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising said she and several women in the country were not only opposed to the expression “keep” but also to the use of phrase “one night stand’ by the Bench in the judgement. “The words are derogatory,” she said


Alimony/Maintenance encourages women to incapacitate themselves. Alimony also increases an already large portion of a physically fit and yet morally handicapped population of women. This contradiction leads to mental imbalance and conflicting behavior among women. For example filing criminal cases against husband and yet asks for Restitution of Conjugal Rights(sic).


Alimony & Maintenance reverse the effects of empowerment, in the sense that they feel constantly dependent on the husband’s male capacity to earn. What greater sense of empowerment is there for a woman who would reject Maintenance and start earning her own living and spending her own hard earned money!! The best assets a woman can have: self-respect, self-confidence, education and ability to sustain her life on her own. Also, an equal share in parental property adds to her financial security.

Alimony/ Maintenance laws are forcing women to create fictional stories of domestic violence & dowry harassment, consequently women start believing their own fiction and hence ignites a chain reaction of sociopathic and psychopathic behavior in them.

Alimony/Maintenance encourages women to commit perjury in court. Even though perjury is a serious crime, since Alimony/Maintenance are the only laws of financial gain which do not ask for proof of investment, it forces the courts to take a lenient view against perjury and slowly starts creating a situation of contempt against itself. This has a serious potential to lead to mental breakdown of judicial officers who are also mere mortals having their own livelihood issues and personal pressures.


An Alimony/Maintenance based economy fosters a generation of children who are bound to be socially and mentally imbalanced misfits. These children are already growing up with an attitude that extortion and perjury is a valid tool of life sustenance. Moral values of the next generation will touch the bottom of the begging bowl. Out of a misguided sense of entitlement; children of this dysfunctional generation will end up begging and looting their own parents , peers, spouses and their own children thereby ending the human race in a feeding frenzy of cannibalism.

The concept of Alimony/Maintenance is in contradiction to laws against beggary and vagrancy.

Because of laws for Alimony/Maintenance women have lowered their image of themselves and promoted the idea that they are the weaker sex. This issue has gone to such an extent that in India, these women loathe the idea that their children might one day become like themselves. Therefore, Indian women are killing their own babies/foetuses if they even suspect that it might be a female child. Female infanticide/foeticide is a direct result of Alimony/Maintenance.

Our idea is to Launch a Womens’ Self-Respect Day. On this day the world will honour and propagate the ideal of equality where women realize that they no longer need support from men either morally, socially or financially. On this day the world will honor women like President Pratibha Patil, Sushma Swaraj, Meira Kumar, Indira Jaising, Indira Nooyi etc., who have made it on their own to become leaders of a nation. On this day, women will give a token amount of money to their husband, father, brother etc., as a mark of independence. On this day, self-respecting, right-thinking, hardworking women will reiterate their disgust and express their loathing of female subjugating and sexually derogatory laws like Alimony & Maintenance.


Co-authored by Uma Challa & Partha

‘Dowry’ Explained in Tanishq’s ad

This is Tanishq’s new jewellery ad. This is the real reason for justifying the existence of laws like IPC 498A and DV Act.
  • The reality is that most Indian parents push their reluctant daughters into marriages.
  • The reality is that most women get married for the love of jewellery and riches.
  • The reality is that it takes a promise of gold for most women to agree to get married.
  • The reality is that an average woman in India agrees to get married because her parents promises her jewellery and property rights. THIS is the real ‘Dowry’.
  • The reality is that most Indian women get married for all the wrong reasons.
Dowry is popularly imagined to be inducement to the groom for marrying the daughter. But the actual explanation of Dowry is clearly shown in this ad. And this is what is happening in India.
As soon as the glamour of the marriage ceremony wears off and the glitter of the gold fades to the reality of life, these gold-digging daughters of India start dreaming of escaping the drudgery of marriage. And they do it in style, aided by the Mengele of our time, the NCW.
  • The rest is the reality of false criminal cases against husbands and their families.
  • The rest is legally aided butchery of men.
  • The rest is legally aided torment of fatherless children.
  • And the concentration camps of Indian Family Courts where the poisonous fumes of bias and oppression kills all voices of reason, conscience and the last whimpers of justice.
  • And all this for these women’s lust for gold.

Alimony is Ransom

http://www.mid-day.com/news/2010/apr/080410-Ayesha-Fareesa-Siddiqui-press-conference-Shoaib-Malik-divorced.htm

We have many words for money not earned. Among other words, Ransom, Extortion, Dowry, Alimony & Maintenance based on the context. However, the concept of forcing by threat of life or litigation; any party to part with their life savings or their projected life savings is the same irrespective of the word used. The underlying element is illegal force, for no man may be forced to live for another.
Simply speaking, the first three words, Ransom, Extortion and Dowry are explicitly classified as illegal by law. But illegal force is not just something that happens outside the law. Sometimes the law can also be illegal. As is the classic and contemporary case of IPC 498A, DV Act and many Maintenance Laws. By forcing any man to part with money to any woman on just the basis of the fact that he is the husband or seemingly the husband or simply accused to be the husband, with the threat of state sponsored force, is itself an act of illegal force under the pretense of law and justice.
To wrap it up, Alimony is equal to Ransom & Maintenance is equal to Extortion.

ALIMONY = DOWRY


In a country where equality is supposed to be the norm on paper at least, the concept of alimony in case of divorce is the same as the concept of dowry during marriage. The latter is separation money given by the father towards the daughter and the former by the husband towards the wife. If we are fighting dowry, alimony should also be opposed.

The greatest crime against women is to keep them in servitude and victimize their psyche with the concept of alimony and maintenance. Why is the self respect/dignity of women being destroyed with the concept of Alimony?

Crimes Against Women Cell!!! Yeah Right!!!

CAW means Crimes Against Women. If you or anyone are summoned by this cell in connection with a complaint(for counselling or not), it means that you are already being treated as a

1). Criminal without trial
2). Criminal who has done crime against women.

Firstly, CAW is a psychological trap designed with only one outcome in mind. To destroy any resistance. The mere act of going to a CAW cell summons will be portrayed as if you and I are going to be sentenced for all the imaginary rapes and molestations done against all women from the present till Eve. It takes a very emotionally stable and clear headed man to come out in one psychological peice.

Secondly, to even acknowledge CAW is to acknowledge the lies of feminists. I will not do that.

Thirdly, let us not take part in putting these feminists in power, not even in a local thana. To do that is to commit Crime Against Men. I totally object to even the existence of the phrase ‘Crimes against Women’. I refuse to allow any man to be summoned to any institution named CAW.

NCW is anti-men and anti-women

http://www.ptinews.com/news/329416_NCW-seeks-to-expand-ambit-of-maintenance#
My comments on PTI news
On the surface, it seems like NCW is unable to contain its hatred for men. However, it is more to justify its own existence than concern for women. On one hand NCW seeks dignity and equality for women and on the other hand it promotes financial dependency of women on men. This is being done by creating and maintaining maintenance and alimony laws that promote and make permanent a victim mindset among women. At best it is promoting a whole gender into practising legalized begging and extortion, instead of promoting an environment of self reliance and dignity. NCW is causing more harm than good towards women. It is time women realized this and took action against NCW.