A desperate band of men, who claim to be victims of dowry laws, hang out together, fighting legal battles and helping each other in this ‘pro-women legal world’

The promises made in the dark and gloomy prison cells last for a long time. Hardcore criminals make professional pacts with the kids locked up for picking pockets. And the bond is stronger if the men are innocent. Slurping a cup of pale tea while evading the prying eyes of hardened killers, or being heckled by petty thieves while standing in queue for lunch, such men often wonder: what am I doing in this place?

The days somehow crawl and pass off. But, when night darkens the stinking cells and dirty corridors and the warders begin to beat their wooden sticks against the metal bars, such ‘innocent’ men are gripped by panic. They share their grief with other such men. The stories are always similar: “I had a life, a good job, a happy family and some dreams. Now it’s a life of minuses: jobless, penniless and hopeless.” Many of them have one more thing in common: They all have been done in by the accusing finger of a woman - their wife, actually - for “harassing her for dowry”.

Enter section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. A woman files an FIR. The man goes to jail. There is no bail. He thinks he is guilty by suspicion. And there is no chance of proving his innocence because the law is “pro-women”. The accusation is enough to prove his guilt.

So, when such men - accused of harassing their wives for dowry - meet, they spit fire on 498A. They are not so angry with the women who put them in such terrible position, but they are at war with the law which fails “to distinguish between real and fake cases of harassment for dowry”.

Sitting under a tree with their lawyers just outside the court or pushing a wad of currency notes into the hands of an officer in a dank police station or talking to each other in hushed tones in murky jails, their tongues turn venomous against 498A: “It’s a marriage splitter; it’s been made to harass the innocent; and this is legal terrorism.”

There is nothing new about the instances of abuse of the dowry harassment law. It has already become a pan-Indian phenomenon. Even the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, has cautioned against the misuse of the anti-dowry Act. But there are new fears now. With a new anti-dowry law - with harsher punishment - on the anvil, the men who claim to be victims of 498A are already getting nervous. They think their hopeless situation may now sink into an endless abyss.

The worries are written clearly on their faces. Many of them meet every week in Delhi’s Patiala House court premises. They discuss their stories. They all have something horrible to tell - stories of disintegration. Amit Kumar had a flourishing business. And then his wife slapped a dowry case on her family. He, his mother and sisters spent weeks in jail. Now he spends time with his lawyer trying “to get out of this mess”. Suraj Prakash lost his job, money and his father within a month of his wife taking him to court. Azam Shaikh’s story is almost the same. So is Kevin D’souza’s.

Now, they are members of a group called Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF), which fights for the rights of men “falsely implicated in dowry cases”. “If the government makes it a bailable offence, half the problems will be solved automatically,” says Rakesh K Lakra who represents many SIFF members. “Women file fake cases to take money from their husbands and get out of marriage,” says Lakra, with an air of authority on marital issues. He looks determined to help his “innocent clients”.

Almost all of these men are educated, many of them English-speaking professionals working with good firms. A good number of them work and live abroad. And many of them have been born and brought up many shores away from India. Now they are all in the same boat, “fighting the draconian law” from different platforms. There is a Men’s Cell whose signboards hang on the central verge at traffic junctions in Delhi, asking a direct question: “Are you being harassed by your wife?” And offering the solution: “Contact the Men’s Cell”. A group of victims in the US set up 498a.org in 2006 to fight the “pro-women laws”. In its first month, the website had 100,000 hits. There are groups and helplines, offering help and sharing tragic tales.

The stories have similar beginnings and endings: “She didn’t like my parents, she didn’t cook, she was always bossy, she ignored me, she already had a lover, she didn’t want kids, she wanted to run away, she wanted my money... she filed a fake case”. For some reason the problem always begins with a small thing: a burnt toast, a leaking tap, a sharp taunt or a tight slap. And then she files a fake case. In all these stories - told in first person and posted on the Net - the women are always scheming sluts who are protected by the law for some strange reason. In all these stories, dowry is almost a myth.

But in India and wherever Indians live, dowry is not a myth. It’s a fact of life. It’s a curse. It takes life. It ruins families. Every year, thousands of women are done to death - burnt alive for a big car, hacked to pieces for cash and jewellery, thrown from a running train for a colour TV and pushed into a river for a bicycle. There are millions of stories - told, hushed up and muffled - of women being tortured for dowry. It’s also a fact that domestic violence against women is on the rise. That’s why there is a law to check it. But it has failed to do so. And, in many cases, it’s being misused.

Some women seem to have learnt a few lessons from men on how to extort money. Trapped in bad marriages or married against their will, they use 498A to get out of it with some money in their purse. This is subversion of the law meant to protect women from harassment. Now, with the new anti-dowry law being proposed, all eyes are on 498A. The women would like the law to be harsher. The dowry seekers would like it to be scrapped. Innocent victims of 498A would like it to be “balanced and reasonable”. And the lawyers and policemen would want a bigger mess, as they are the biggest beneficiaries in this battle of the sexes.

(Some names have been changed)