Conditions of Emergence: The Formation of Men’s Rights Groups in Contemporary India

Abstract

Drawing on a one-year research project, this article attempts to make a feminist appraisal of the phenomenon of men’s rights groups in contemporary India. This effort is structured in two parts. The expository section of this article addresses the following questions: who are the members of men’s rights groups and what are their social locations? What are their goals? Who are their supporters? What methods of recruitment do they employ? The latter, and longer, part of the article maps the ambient environment in which the issue of men’s rights has been framed in an organised form since the early 1990s. It asks: in what ways are these collective markings of a historically privileged masculine identity related to broader processes of cultural, social and legal change? The article suggests that the demand for men’s rights in India is to be explained by the reconstitution of patriarchy—expressed particularly in altered gender roles within the family—that has been necessitated by the dual pressures of economic change and feminist legal intervention in the previous two decades. The anxious call for men’s rights is indicative of a crisis tendency in the contemporary gender order, which has, at specific moments, undermined the legitimacy of some patriarchal arrangements. The organised form in which this collective male concern has been voiced has been facilitated by the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and Internet technologies in India from the 1990s onwards.

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Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender, generation, and personhood

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“…Citing figures that suggest that the majority of Indian men (and many Indian women) feel that wife‐beating is morally justified in some instances, Chowdhury argues that rights‐based legislation about gender violence is threatening to many men because of a widespread patriarchal expectation from men that they must punish women for violating the codes of feminine propriety. ‘False accusation’, then, becomes the linchpin of men's rights articulation precisely because these men feel that they are being criminalized for actions proper to their gender roles (Chowdhury : 44).…”

“…In such a context, ‘it becomes possible to understand that for men [in these societies], the existence of a set of [rights‐based] laws which criminalises domestic violence in an overall culture that authorises violence against women as a script of male honour puts the very meaning of masculinity under pressure’ (Chowdhury : 44).…”

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