Persecution Complex

India’s radical meninists come out of the closet / Gender and Sexuality

- Aditya Mani Jha

On 23 September, Delhi’s Constitution Club hosted two well-attended gatherings. The first was the concluding day of the National Convention against Assault on Journalists, a sombre affair with a media fraternity under fire quietly asserting its rights. The late Gauri Lankesh, whose brazen murder last year had sparked national outrage, was remembered. Prominent journalists such as Siddharth Varadarajan and Josy Joseph spoke about press freedom and its current state in India. It was all very sobering—until one discovered the other, even more sobering, event taking place at the same time.

This was the first Conference on National Commission for Men, organised by Deepika Narayan Bharadwaj, an engineer-turned-documentary filmmaker, in association with the Save Indian Family Foundation. It was a full house by the time the event was to start at 3 pm, with people who could not find seats lining up in the corridors. Beady-eyed volunteers milled about, passing around pamphlets, in bright yellow t-shirts that proclaimed their commitment to “real gender justice.”

In 2017, Bharadwaj was profiled by a string of publications, including the BBC, after she made a documentary titled Martyrs of Marriage, based on real-life cases involving the alleged misuse of Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, often called the “anti-dowry law.” She soon became one of the most visible faces of the Indian men’s-rights movement. It was during the making of this film that Bharadwaj came across the SIFF, which completed its tenth anniversary earlier this year. To celebrate the occasion, around a hundred and fifty members travelled to Varanasi to perform “the last rites of their marital relations.”