There are many reasons why the internet is fun, and one of them is it throws up such amusing things every now and then, and you wouldn’t want to miss them for other world.
We were researching for a piece on gender discrimination in India and clicked on the Wikipedia page, which was the very first link.
Here is what the section of the page reads. Feminists with high-BP issues, we advise you to close this window and remain healthy. The section is titled, ahem, ‘Discrimination towards men’. (emphasis added)
Discrimination towards men
Although socially women have been at a disadvantage, Indian laws highly favour women. If a husband commits adultery he will be jailed, but a woman cannot be jailed for adultery and neither will she be punished by the courts. There is no recognition of sexual molestation of men and rarely the police stations lodge an First Information Report(FIR); men are considered the culprit by default even if it was the woman that committed sexual abuse against men.[citation needed] Women can jail husband's family for dowry related cases by just filing an FIR. The law IPC 498A demands that the husband's family be considered guilty by default, unless proven otherwise, in other words it implements the doctrine of 'guilty unless proven innocent' defying the universally practised doctrine of 'innocent until proven guilty'. According to one source, this provision is much abused as only four percent of the cases go to the court and the final conviction rate is as low as two percent.[12][verification needed]
Judiciary discrimination
There are many laws including 498a, false rape laws etc., favoring women to greater extent. If a man files a rape complaint, it's not considered as rape, since rape clearly is for men and not for women. If a woman rapes man then court cant punish her.
498A
Out of 100 cases filed under this section in India, only 4% is the conviction rate. Parliament is still holding its firm stance on this law. This is being more misused than being used in proper way. According to the National Crime Records Bureau statistics, nearly 200,000 people, including 47,951 women, were arrested in regard to dowry offences in 2012, but only 15% of the accused were convicted. Arrest in Dowry offences in 2012 is 9.4% more than in 2011 and it is continuously increasing. [14][13]
Here's a screenshot.
Now if you think Men’s Rights Activist are not a problem, then think again.
If you think what’s written above is not a problem, then you would make a good Men’s Rights Activist.
And why is the text above a problem, since you ask?
We are having our columnist on gender issues Ragamalika Karthikeyan from Prajnya, explain it for you.
“When half the article on gender discrimination speaks about men as victims, and nowhere are gender minorities even mentioned, it's amusing to say the least. The section on discrimination against men misrepresents facts: for instance, according to Indian law, a man committing adultery can be jailed if the husband of the woman files a complaint, because according to the law, the woman is considered her husband's property. Further, a husband committing adultery cannot be jailed even if the wife files a complaint.
The section goes on to say judiciary discriminates against men; in the same breath, it also says the conviction rates in 498A cases are very low. If the judiciary was so pro-women, shouldn't the conviction rates be a lot higher? It also draws a false equivalence between conviction rates and 'false cases' -- an age old trick used by people to prove their point without actually looking at the merits of a case.”