Saving the married men

Yash Goyal

Thirty-three-year-old Manoj Kumar, a software engineer of Bengaluru, gotmarried to an educated girl on the condition that he would live with her family as "Ghar Jamai". But he tried to take care of his parents despite being a Ghar Jamai, his wife started harassing him. His married life turned into a nightmare when she lodged a case under Section 498A of IPC against him and his parents. That finally led him to commit suicide.

Manoj’s is not an isolated case. There are others who committed suicide after facing cases under Section 498-A lodged by their wives and in-laws.

The misuse of this section of law is the theme for a 90-minute documentary Martyrs of Marriage made by producer-director Deepika Narayan, who talked about it Jaipur recently.

She studied such cases before making the documentary. It took her four years and she executed it by investing her own money and crowd funding. Since its release in October 2016, the documentary has been screened in many cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Pune, Ahmedbad, and Tamil Nadu.

The documentary explores at length the misuse of the law and suicide by men because of domestic violence and harassment through false cases.

In the movie, Justice S N Dhingra, former judge of Delhi High Court, admitted this section has been grossly misused.

On why Deepika she chose this subject, Deepika said, "Something this sort happened in my family when an innocent man was trapped by the woman (wife) who lived in an extra-marital affair and falsely implicated him in the court. I then decided to make the people aware the true picture.”