PRESS RELEASE: SIFF Demands No Arrests No Maintenance in Marital Disputes

Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF) is a non-funded non-profit NGO fighting for men’s rights, Gender Equality and Family Harmony by creating awareness against the misuse of anti-male laws like Section 498A (the dowry law), the Domestic Violence Act, and the various Maintenance laws etc. which are systematically breaking down the family system of India and perpetrating state sponsored abuse against men.

It is pertinent to note that in the last 65 years of Indian Independence neither a single rupee has ever been allocated for men’s welfare nor has a single Constitutional/Academic body ever been formed to study the problems faced by men let alone addressing them.

This emptiness has led SIFF to do research on men’s problems, talk to the victimized men,  understand their pain, collect data and statistics related to men’s abuse and create awareness  about them. SIFF has been doing this research since the last 8 years. Also SIFF and its allied NGOs all over India, have been engaging in various awareness campaigns to create awareness of men’s issues through media, internet blogs and road protests.

The Problem:

One of the major problems that men face around marriages is criminalization of marital disputes. Every relationship has its own share of ups and downs, incompatibilities. However, it is being observed that with every year passing it is becoming a fashion for the wife’s family to threaten husband’s family of false dowry cases and false maintenance cases if the demands of the wife and/or her family are not met by husband and/or his family.

Marital disputes are being used an excuse to convert bad marriages into false criminal cases based on false allegations of physical torture and dowry demand by husband towards the wife.

Police Atrocities:

1. Even the police are hand-in-glove with the wife’s family. When a wife approaches a police station, promptly an FIR under section 498A IPC is lodged and husband and his family is summoned to the police station under the pretext of counseling.
2. While even though the police is not authorized to conduct marital counseling, it attempts to do so and uses the excuse to threaten husband and his family to bow down before his wife’s demands else face false cases.
3. Husband is subjected to psychological and emotional torture (even physical at times) so that he breaks down and surrenders to the demand of his wife, which mostly revolves around giving huge sums of money and/or property to wife to “settle” the matter.
4. Nowadays, it is being observed that the police is even going to offices where the husband works in order to defame him and try to arrest him without an arrest warrant, without showing him the complaint copy and completely violating Section 41(1)(a) of the amended CrPC as per The CrPC Amendment Act, 2010.
5. As per this amendment, for all crimes punishable less than seven years of imprisonment, the accused must first be served with “Notice of Appearance”. If the accused does not comply with it, only then the police can arrest them. However, the police would be required to conduct thorough investigation prior to that on the complaint received, examine evidences presented, get an arrest warrant issued and record the reasons, as to why the accused was unable to comply with the “Notice of Appearance”.
7. But, as we examine the cases of harassment of men that come to us, we find that the police do none of this. Instead, they either call the husband on his mobile repeatedly to threaten him to come to police else face dire consequences, or create social pressure on him by going to his office and endangering his job. All this happens at the instance of an unverified and uninvestigated complaint.

Inefficient Judiciary:

1. The Indian judiciary is also no less an evil in tormenting husband and his family in order to “Break” him so that he bows down before his wife’s demand which mostly revolve around getting a divorce after the husband pays “Extortion Amount” under the cute name of “Alimony” to the tune of millions and crores at times.
2. It is not a rare occurrence for a husband to be asked in court, “How much are you willing to pay to your wife to close the case?”
3. While, the husband knows he is innocent and the case lodged against him is false and the more he tries to run the case on merits, the more is his harassment. The commonest form of harassment is in the form of maintenance orders slapped against the husband.
4. Even if the wife is working, but if husband is not able to prove her employment, then courts make no efforts to ascertain the same on their own even when they have been given immense powers to do so.
5. As soon as the case is filed, the husband is gifted with an “interim maintenance order” which is decided even before looking into the merits of the case. Once, this order is passed, the cases drag on for years. While, the poor husband keeps running from pillar to post trying to prove his innocence before an insensitive judiciary, the wife enjoys the husband’s hard-earned money and uses his own money against him.
6. Women, deliberately leave their jobs just to get maintenance from husband and the maintenance ordered is nothing less than 20K – 30K per month. Women, also hide their source of income in order to present themselves as “Destitute” before the court in order to get maintenance. They even go to the extent of shedding crocodile tears in courts to overrule evidence analysis and more often than not judges pass orders based on emotions and social mindset rather than logic and facts on record.
7. The Indian Judiciary has failed to set examples by punishing women who lie in court whereas the judges are behooved to do so.

The Consequences:

As a result of this anti-male bias in the legal system, men live under a lot of stress in marriages and as soon as their marriage is on rocks, they start fearing that their life is over. Added to that, social mindsets do not welcome a whining man as he is termed as “loser” and that he is not “man enough” to make his marriage work. Due to such language, the entire blame and responsibility of the marriage falls on the poor husband who finds no avenue helpful to him.

Exasperated, frustrated and horrified, many a men take recourse to ending their lives, a fact which is corroborated by the suicide figures published by the Union Home Ministry year after year.

In the year 2011, 62433 husbands committed suicides compared to 32582 wives. A cursory glance at the previous years establishes the trend.

 Source: http://ncrb.nic.in/adsi/main.htm

 Also, as per analysis by the Union Home Ministry, domestic violence is the number one reason of suicides for both men and women alike. As the numbers of married men committing suicide is almost double the number of married women committing suicides, it is very clear that men are currently unprotected in marriages.

 The Clarion Call:

 Realizing the gravity of the situation, Save Indian Family Foundation makes a clarion call on the 19^th of January 2013 calling upon men and women alike to participate in a peaceful protest March from Town Hall Bangalore to Mysore Bank Circle. The protest will begin at 9:30 AM in the morning from Town Hall and shall end at 2:00 PM at Mysore Bank Circle.

The theme of the protest is “No Arrest, No Maintenance in Marital Disputes” along with the following demands placed before the Govt. of India:

1. Stop arresting innocent men and their families without investigation and trial in dowry cases.
2. Stop forcing men to maintain their estranged wives who approach court with unclean hands and fabricated desertion stories.
3. Sensitize the police and judiciary with the problems faced by men.
4. Treat husbands with dignity and integrity in marital disputes.
5. Form state wise and national commission of men to study problems faced by men in India.
6. Institute a Men’s Welfare Ministry to implement welfare schemes specifically targeted towards men and to create pro-male laws.
7. Stop treating husbands as FREE ATM MACHINES.
8. Protect men and their families from abusive wives and false dowry and domestic violence cases.
9. Take necessary steps to reduce suicides by men.
10. Take necessary steps not to project men negatively in media.

 Similar protests will also be held in Kolkata, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Nagpur on the same day with the same theme and same demands.

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