No Holiday for Misandry

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The foot-in-the-mouth virus makes a  post-monsoon comeback with Smt.Maneka Gandhi showing clarity of confusion with her “Paternity leave will be just a holiday for men” statement while speaking about the Maternity Benefit Bill. http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/paternity-leave-will-be-just-a-holiday-for-men-says-maneka-gandhi-2993274/


Although said with sarcasm, the Women and Child Development Minister unintentionally admitted that men work harder than women and therefore “men do not even avail their existing leave entitlements to share the responsibility of child care”. A little indulgence of forethought required of any deserving Minister would have revealed to her that men in India cannot afford to take leave from work since it is mostly men who take on the responsibility of maintaining the family financially. How else can we explain the existence of multiple maintenance provisions only against men?

 

The confusion gets a little worse if we consider the fact that women’s rights advocates actually lament the absence of care of pregnant women by the husbands and can even be termed as domestic violence by way of negligence. Damned if you ‘leave’ it and damned if you dont.
However, for all intents and purposes it is not the mandate or duty or right of any WCD Minster to discuss the welfare or affairs of men even though ministers get elected on the basis of mixed gender votes and use the taxes which are almost completely paid by men.
It seems that the WCD Minister is the one who definitely has taken a holiday from sensibility, therefore we pray to the WCD Minister to take an unpaid leave of absence and reset her misandry index back to zero. I say unpaid because most of the taxes are paid by men who work and earn by not taking leave.
On the bright side it is a welcome change for WCD to be finally talking of ‘safeguards’ and ‘misuse’ of provisions of the Maternity Benefit Bill by women. Thats a start!

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

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?