News reports of an Indian couple being persecuted under Norwegian laws recently made headlines and triggered a lot of heated debate.  Are our laws really any better, fairer? Feminists who want to bash me up for this post can get in a line, but before you do so, I ask that I be given a fair trial.

For years, women have been persecuted by the dominant male faction in this 'glorious' country of ours.  Do I condone that? Not for a moment.  I also don't condone the caste-based excesses that have thrived unopposed, for centuries in our country.  Today however, we have two things in our society, neither of which is constructive or helpful to build a society free of caste and gender-based inequality.  Caste-based reservations, which were aimed to give the repressed a fair life have now gone on to become an electoral issue rather than a social one: political parties use reservations and the promise of more lucre to the 'supposedly backward' to attract votes.  The other deplorable thing? Laws which are totally gender-biased, laws which are made to give women supreme power, absolving them of all wrongdoing,  while punishing the men, often for no reason other than for the excesses committed by their forefathers.


Take the anti-dowry legislation in India for instance.  The latest avatar of the anti-dowry law in India is called as Section 498A.  You may read about it here. It allows for a husband and any of his relatives to be jailed, without the prospect of bail, on the basis of a simple one-line complaint by a married woman: no other proof is necessary and the accused are deemed guilty, until proven innocent.  The maximum sentence, if proven guilty, is three years, but given the rate at which Indian courts dispose of pending cases, it's not at all unusual for people, including innocent victims, to spend more than the maximum sentence time, just as under-trials. Figures about the misuse of section 498A vary very much, with even the most conservative figures indicating that as many as 30% of all dowry harassment cases filed in Indian courts are false, with other estimates indicating as many as 85% all filed cases to be false and malicious in nature.

http://www.498a.org/ is a site which hopes to crusade against this extremely unfair law.  Here are some statistics, gathered by the site, to let you know how skewed this law is:
Under false cases involving Section 498A,
An INNOCENT child is arrested every day.
An INNOCENT senior citizen is arrested every 2.4 hours.
An INNOCENT woman is arrested every 23 minutes.
An INNOCENT person is arrested every 5 minutes. (presumably an aggregation of the above listed and men)
The site, and this document quote sources for their statistics and claims, so those of you who wish to verify/ratify them would have an opportunity to do so.

The primary motivation behind all these false cases seems to be an opportunity to extract money, closely followed by women guilty of adultery, looking for a bargaining chip in what would otherwise be a messy and 'unrewarding' divorce. Speaking of adultery, the Indian penal code states thus:

497. Adultery.-- Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.

Nowhere does this law provide for the possibility of a woman indulging in adultery. If a married woman were to have a physical relationship with somebody who is not her legally wedded husband, oh, the Indian law would penalize the other person for it and not the woman. Get's better and better, doesn't it?

What prompted this post was an article in the newspapers a couple of days back. It mentioned a boy from IIT Delhi being charged with harassment and blackmail. He was allegedly trying to blackmail a girl from IIT Kanpur into marrying him by threatening to make public photographs and video footage of 'their private moments together'.  Now, if the boy is indeed guilty of his alleged crimes, I don't condone it at all, but it still raises a very interesting point about how the long arm of the Indian law targets men alone. In India, if a boy and a girl have a physical relationship together and the girl dumps the boy,  the boy is advised to 'be a man and get on with his life'.  Their physical relationship, if there was any, would apart from triggering titters and vulgar comments would be entirely irrelevant. Now, switch sides.  If the boy were to lose interest in the relationship and walk away, all the girl would have to do is file a police complaint, and suddenly, all those sessions of passionate, consensual sex that the couple enjoyed in better times now get a new tag: rape. The boy is then generally roughed up by the 'friendly neighborhood policemen', beaten up and threatened with multiple charges of rape if he does not choose to do the 'honorable thing' by marrying the 'victim', the girl. 

I was frankly amazed when I read reports, sometime back, of some aspiring 'Bollywood starlet' who accused a well-known Bollywood film director, of having raped her several times, over a span of more than two years. Did the director kidnap her on so many occasions? Oh no. She went to his place, every time. Now, apparently, consensual sex is considered rape if the male had promised to marry the 'victim' in question.  Would a girl be penalized for dumping a boy, after years of being together (physically and otherwise), with marriage very much having been on the cards? Oh, no. The male has no grounds to complain, whatsoever. It's something that only a woman is empowered with, to enable her to get her way in any relationship, if she so chooses. It's high time these outdated statutes and laws are updated, as they are, I believe,  in direct violation of the first fundamental right which is promised to each and every citizen of India:
Right to equality, including equality before law, prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, abolition of untouchability and abolition of titles.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this.

Edit:-
I totally agree with the idea that women's rights need to be safeguarded in any self-respecting society. Men have in the past perpetrated grave and horrific crimes against women and unfortunately, many are still doing it. However, while it might seem like poetic justice that these skewed laws are making men 'pay' for all the wrongs done onto women, it's in my opinion akin to charging every non-Jewish German, both born and unborn, with heinous crimes against the Jews, for what Hitler did. Every person in a self-respecting society deserves fair laws, irrespective of their religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.