-By Rahul Kayarat

And that’s how this documentary piece reels you in with a gut punching story and visual of a man’s final tears of ensuing death. A step chosen by him to end it all. That is how this documentary begins. With the end of someone else’s story, their battle. Not 5 minutes in and you are enthralled to know more. And the rest 68 minutes are followed by a deep understanding and eye opening narrative of the Martyrs of Marriage, victims of false 498A cases.

498A is a provision which was laid out with obvious good intent on the society and the people inhabited, as all laws are meant to do, by abolishing unlawful demand of dowry and bring to justice the act of harassment on or towards the wife in a marriage, by either the husband or his family or both. Fairly after the ruling of the provision a lot of good came to the women of the country. Where this went sour is the blatant inequality seen in the words penned in the amendment itself. What was realized by some is how this law and the small loophole this law contains can be used to get a crutch out of others to milk out something without which nothing in the country runs, money.

Queue the families of Makhdoom, Avadesh and Manoj Kumar, who tell the tales of these martyrs who succumbed to injustice by falsely being accused of 498A. Them and their families, who thought bringing a woman home in the ritual of holy matrimony would put smiles all around, she not only stripped them off that happiness, but also took with them their dignity, pride and a life that will never be gained back. Seeing their families suffer because of a problem they thought they invited lead them to take the extreme step no human should be forced to go through, just to clear their name off some charge sheet and give an escape to their families, which as a matter of fact was the last wish in the notes few of them left. Is the cost of breaking free from the chains of stigma and depreciation from the society for something a person didn’t even do an actual life?

Yes, 498A drives the accused and the families crazy because it is written to be a cognizable, non bailable and non compoundable offence. What’s crazier is that it can be complained against an ‘n’ number of people, and no investigation ensues whatsoever, meaning it is of law that the woman’s verbal statement is to be taken as evidence of 100% credibility and the accused, no matter if there’s 20 of them or if one of them is a 8 month old child (yes, a real world example mentioned in the documentary) are to be immediately arrested. Some cases even include people living overseas being accused of daily abuse, people who haven’t stepped in the country for years.

Now, how can something related to a false accusation be talked about without including lawyers and the judicial system? The documentary mentions the whole 498A false cases scheme as a provision turned into a racket. It is something which the lawyers defending for the women are very much in on for a quick share of the money received. The “racket” is not that hard to understand. Petty cases which occur between married couple, sometimes even related to the woman’s in laws, turn into a 498A case. They usually go this route thinking this would end their problems as they have leverage now, but it quickly turns into an unwanted divorce. Things like greed and lawyers putting things into their minds turns things into an actual lawsuit, one which proceeds to rot the relationship even further but harm the man and his family even more so.

As it is clear from the stories of people like Chandan Mukherjee, Hussein Ali, Chetan S Kanu and Partha, not only are these false allegations a crack in the married life of a person, it takes away their reputation, dignity and credibility as an individual in the eyes of the society, especially in front of such a hive minded one which we happen to live in. This in turn affects the quality of life and opportunities given to them. If one, after such allegations chooses to be brave and fight them to prove his innocence, then he’s looking at least at 10 or more years of his life being scrutinized due to the constant visits to police stations and court houses, and of course the delay in the case getting picked up by the system to be heard. That is the sad truth of the Indian Judicial System. Chetan who actively fought his truth after a false 498A after 14 years of marriage faces trouble finding work even after being a reputed scientist. On the other hand is Chandan, who lost the rights to see his son whom he got the chance to love and caress only gor a few months. Not to forget the humiliation faced by the likes of him and Partha, being picked up by police officials in front of their families, neighbors and colleagues, and being roughly interrogated in a demeaning way, pushed into a cell with people who are probably murderers.

One of the even worse negatives of these cases is that neither party can get remarried till the cases are cleared off their names. Even though a man has enough evidence to prove his innocence, who’s going to listen to him once a woman says he’s a bad person? That’s how systematically weak this provision stands. After being trapped, there is no way left for him to escape other than to comply with the demands of the woman. As a lawyer part of the documentary who has had experience dealing with these cases states, there hasn’t been a single case in their whole career where they saw the case being settled without some sort of agreement where money is exchanged. A man has to bear all the loss one way or the other.

Other than taking us on a ride through the hardcore reality of a law misused, where people end up losing lives because of the mental exhaustion and toll on them and their families, the director and producer of the documentary, Ms. Deepika Narayan Bharadwaj, who is an Independent Journalist and a Documentary Filmmaker, throws at us hardcore statistics and a load of other issues persisting men rights, some including how there is no law for paternity fraud and how a married woman cannot be tried for Adultery (IPC 497). There exist no laws that protect a man from marital abuse, which in grounded reality, very much exists. It throws a light on the false rape cases, on how as harassment is bailable, the alleged victims file for a fake rape case over the father-in-laws, destroying even the smallest of reputation they have left in the society. Delhi Commision for Women published a report in 2014 stating about 53% of the rapes reported in the city in the year prior were flagged as “false” at a later point.

This eye opening documentary, which ran on Netflix for 2 years, brings awareness to an important issue, which needs to be talked about more and found a solution for within gender neutral grounds, without making it about “men vs. women”. You will not realize the 1hr23mins of your life pass by as you’re sucked into the core of the unseen and unheard issues that happen right in front of us every day without us realizing until it affects us or one of our loved ones. If you don’t believe my words, feel free to check out the comments section on the YouTube upload of this documentary where hundreds have written their pieces of life and how they or their relatives are going through the grinders of fake 498A allegations. The comment section will prove to you a side of “MeToo’s” that are under looked by everyone because they are categorized into the gender that is male.

You can watch Deepika Bharadwaj’s Martyrs of Marriage here –