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

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.

‘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.

India joins International Legal Terrorism Club

With Shoaib Malik’s passport being seized by the police in India, this fair country has joined the ranks of terrorist groups who have no compunction in unleashing their twisted ideologies and hatred against another classification of people….in this case the classification happens to be men.

Even men of other nationalities are not spared the trauma of being incarcerated(not yet in Malik’s case, but the pain of being defamed and accused in public is just the same). The prime postulate under any law, presumed innocent unless proven guilty, is the first victim under my fair country’s legal march against men.
Will the US’ war against terrorism include the legal terrorism being exported from India, or will the US support the feminist and gender biased I-VAWA?
Will sports personalities continue to blindly endorse the feminist Taliban of so-called ‘Violence Against Women’?