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

New Middle-Class Imaginings of Nation and Men’s Rights

Economic liberalisation in India has been attended by a significant change in middle-class attitudes and lifestyles. If the consumption of commodities made available by the opening up of the economy connotes the so-called benefits of globalisation, its principal carrier is the new urban middle class (Fernandes, 2006). Through a variety of representational strategies that positively associate the urban middle class with cultures of consumption and a pro-liberalisation stance, this social group has been exalted as the desirable standard for a nation set to compete in a global market (Fernandes, 2006, p. 52).

While this has been the dominant mode of representing the new middle class, particularly in mass media images, its construction has hardly been a seamless process. It is important to clarify that the practices by which this middle-class identity has been produced often reflect the frictional interplay between nationalist anxieties and the processes of globalisation. The infiltration of images of Western consumerist culture into homes through television channels, and their free circulation in the public domain, has fuelled fresh anxieties about national culture (Menon, 2004a). The two decades following the opening up of the Indian economy has seen new efforts to police women’s clothing and behaviour, justified by invoking notions of cultural purity (Menon, 2004a, p. 100). It is noteworthy that while this kind of nationalist rhetoric has been voiced both by the right and left wings, if in varying degrees, another kind of national response, one from the consuming elites, has opposed such acts of moral policing in the language of ‘choice’ and ‘women’s right to their bodies’ (Menon, 2004a, p. 101). Public debates on hosting the Miss World pageant in Bangalore in November 1996, for instance, were torn between desires to exhibit a spectacular, globalising India to an international audience and save the nation from the twin threats of imperialism and ‘foreign’ culture. As Rupal Oza (2001) demonstrates, for both opponents and supporters of the event, women’s bodies became the ground on which the cartography of the nation was drawn, to express either a national Hindu identity or the attainment of a global modernity (Oza, 2001, p. 1073). We may note that a crucial component in the latter project—that is, the attainment of an idea of global modernity—is the creation of the ‘new Indian woman’, imaged in the figure of the urban educated middle-class career woman. Feminist analyses of this discourse of femininity in contemporary India have exposed the gambit of a new patriarchy, one which associates the modernity of this new womanhood with making the right consumer choices, while simultaneously mooring her in tradition by showing her espousal of Indian family values (Sunder Rajan, 1993, p. 124).

The formation of groups demanding men’s rights, the majority of whose members belong to the new urban middle class, may be understood by unravelling the relationship of such groups to the cultural politics that I have outlined above. This task may be pursued by first isolating some of the interpretive frames that men’s rights activists recurrently use to understand the impact of liberalisation on gender relations. I encountered three sets of opinions among activists on this issue. These may be summarised as follows:

Families are breaking up today because of the alliance between feminism and consumerism; if husband and wife live in separate houses then they need two houses, two cars, etc.

The allegation that the excesses of feminism-instigated consumerism and the belief that thrift is an Indian value are plainly incompatible with the feverish consumption of consumer durables that has been commonly associated with the new middle class in India. Given the support which the new middle class lent to the broadcasting of the 1996 Miss World pageant, the concern about the contaminating effect of television images on women is also at variance with middle-class attitudes to English television programming, which consider these to be indices of global modernity. An analysis of the emergence of men’s rights groups in India has to work through these cultural contradictions.

Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995) demonstrate the primary role played by consumption practices in the making of South Asian middle-class identities. The relationship of men’s rights groups to consumption and the national imaginary, however, is a complicated one, in that it cannot be understood solely in terms of the close linkage between middle-class identity, consumerist cultures and national development that has frequently been underscored by researchers. In outlining the class base of this collective call for men’s rights, we are better served by the insight that the middle class in India has used its cultural capital in diverse, even contradictory, ways, speaking simultaneously for and against authority and radical change (Baviskar and Ray, 2011). Men’s rights groups’ disavowal of consumerism is to be partially explained, I suggest, by examining the historical roots of the new middle class, particularly the mindset that was embodied by this class vis-à-vis Nehru’s socialism and the austerities of the Indira Gandhi era. Unlike in the post-liberalisation period, which has seen the new middle class express itself through conspicuous consumption, in the 1960s and 1970s, being middle class meant ‘being fiscally prudent and living within one’s means’ (Baviskar and Ray, 2011, p. 6). Their unease about the threat to cultural purity, on the other hand, has an affinity with the Hindu right’s interpretations of national culture. The new middle class, we may remember, comprises a part of the Hindu right’s electoral base (Menon, 2004a). The assertion of men’s rights groups that the break-up of middle-class families will sound the death knell of the nation, however, clearly reflects middle-class claims of being representatives of the nation (Fernandes, 2006). The demand for men’s rights from sections of the new middle class represents the formation of a new bloc within this social group, one that has had to reassess its relation to the dominant mores of middle-class life in the flux of the previous 20 years. In the following subsections, I shall try to show how this faction draws selectively from extant public discourses on the multiple facets of modernity to articulate its peculiar politics of gender. The first step in this direction is to probe the gendered renderings of the demand for men’s rights, particularly their intimate connection with recent changes in family living.

Changes in Family and Anxious Masculinity

The steady integration of India into the global economy and the transnational flow of people and ideas that this has facilitated have resulted in some significant changes in family life for a particular section of Indian society. The weakening of the sex–reproduction dyad has allowed the pursuit of sexual satisfaction outside the boundaries of heterosexual marriage, what is called ‘serial monogamy’ has increasingly become usual and many middle-class working couples seem to be choosing to remain childless (Uberoi, 2006). While these changes are certainly restricted both in terms of number and in social appeal, the commercial media has added grist to ‘new’ lifestyle choices by presenting premarital sex, gay and lesbian sexualities, live-in relationships, adultery and divorce as growing trends in sexual and kinship practices in urban India (Uberoi, 2006, p. 29). Yet, as Patricia Uberoi suggests, small though these changes certainly are it would be inaccurate to say that they have had no impact on family mores in India. Rather, some of these changes may indeed have worked to improve middle-class women’s situation within the family, though we must be cautious not to overstate this.

A section from a circular shared at the 4th Annual National Men’s Rights Meet reads, ‘The holy institution of the family is struggling today for its survival and suffering with dislocation in the era of globalisation for India [sic]…. Today the Indian joint family is being crushed under the commands of corporate governance.’ It is crucial to remember that because the phenomenon of men’s rights groups is still in the process of constituting itself as a movement, it is unreasonable to expect a practised unity in their world views. For instance, by the term ‘joint family’ it seems that activists mean both property-sharing, co-residential groups related to each other patrilineally, and the ‘stem family’ comprising parents or a single surviving parent, living with a married son and his children (Uberoi, 2006, p. 24). It is also worth noting that public obsession in India with the supposedly imminent breakdown of the Indian joint family system under the cumulative impact of urbanisation, Westernisation, individualisation and the liberation of women is not coterminous with neo-liberalism. I will suggest, however, that for particular upper-caste, middle-class sections of Indian society for whom the joint family is certainly a much cherished national value, the many faces of the Western other may have gradually assumed an alarming visage in the previous decade. The formation of men’s rights groups in this period may be read as symptomatic of a gendered anxiety about a perceived infringement of national culture, stemming from an alteration in patriarchal social arrangements. As Uberoi (2006, p. 170) reminds us, for a globalising India ‘the “imagined economy” can no longer convincingly iconicise the nation, [and] the family remains … the sole institution which can signify the unity, uniqueness, and moral superiority of Indian culture’. Men’s rights groups’ anxious response to developments in the previous two decades, we must be careful to note, is not merely masculinist but also foregrounds a beleaguered masculine gender identity in opposition to targeted others—namely, feminism, globalisation and family law. This peculiar gendered reaction both draws on and is impelled by the dominant belief that women’s liberation will herald the breakdown of the Indian family.

Samseva, a Lucknow-based men’s rights group, claims in one of its pamphlets,

Today we are amidst a society upholding selfish Personal Rights than wholesome prosperity…. Samseva has emerged from highly regardable Patriotism and from people who submits themselves for this noble country’s service…. We intend to protect the values of society’s first and smallest unit, the family, through reinstating our culture [sic].

Recent sociological work on families in India suggests that the neo-liberal emphasis on the pursuit of self-interest may be opposed to the gendered ideals of self-sacrifice and duty which are organic to the moral economy of the Indian family (Uberoi, 2006). This is a valuable insight; however, it does not by itself explain the specifically male anxiety about family and national disintegration that the formation of men’s rights groups indicates. This contradiction between consumerist self-seeking and self-abnegation for the sake of the family has been managed, as we have seen, in the figure of the new Indian woman, who is both Indian and modern, whose individual choices are attuned to the interests of her family. Keeping in mind men’s rights groups’ disquiet about consumerism and the new Indian woman, it seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that this patriarchal solution is not working in favour of some middle-class men. The question that we now need to ask is: why is this so?

Gender roles deemed appropriate for men and women, as we noted earlier, have been modified in response to the demands of women’s activism and a new economy. The salaries now available to educated middle-class women place them in a better bargaining position to negotiate family restrictions on professional choice and access to public life (Patel, 2010; Saavala, 2010). Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase’s (2003) study of the paradoxical impact of globalisation on middle-class women shows, interestingly, that post-liberalisation it has become more challenging to mobilise middle-class women around gender issues because gender equality is often assumed to have already arrived. This idea of a world that is already gender-just is frequently echoed by men’s rights activists who claim that today women have equal access to education and employment opportunities. It is of some significance that a strong motivating logic driving the activities of men’s rights groups is that the family needs to be saved from the onslaught of law. Indeed, a nagging refrain that accompanies the call for men’s rights at all times is ‘feminists are breaking the family by allowing law to enter the private space of the home’. The concern for men’s rights is raised, then, because it is felt that at a time when gender equality has already been achieved, multiplying legal provisions with respect to the conjugal relation criminalises particular forms of men’s behaviour in the home with the ultimate goal of breaking the ‘Indian family’. I will argue that the new working woman, who is educated and socially aware, is one icon in a larger sign system which includes consumerism, women’s legal rights and Western culture, which challenges the legitimacy of one form of patriarchal masculinity. It is this that underlies men’s rights advocates’ otherwise curious rejection of consumerism and the new Indian woman.

In this context we may refer to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s argument that ‘the controversies around women in India in the past decade … have arisen out of the conflict between communal/familial values on the one hand and the concept of rights as an individual, legal entitlement on the other’ (1993, p. 137). There is of course a fine paradox in the attempt to resolve the perceived conflict between familial values and legal entitlements of the individual by undermining women’s rights and claiming rights for men. This apparent inconsistency is explained if we understand that the call for men’s rights in its present form is hardly ever only about the male individual. Rather its demands are couched in the larger moral project of saving the family and the nation. Any conflict between the demand for men’s legal rights and family/community values is, therefore, mitigated not so much by a simple assertion of male supremacy but by the moral terms which structure the project of men’s rights.

The emergence of a collective demand for men’s rights, I would like to stress, cannot be explained entirely as a function of changes in gender roles within the family. Feelings of male disenfranchisement in the wake of new legal rights for women require a detailed interrogation of their relation to women’s activism in the period.

Women’s Activism and Legal Reforms

A significant agenda of the various strands in the contemporary women’s movement has been to expose and seek redress for the many forms of violence that women face, particularly in the intimate spheres of their lives. In pursuing this agenda, feminists have countered roseate pictures of family life by pointing out that the family’s claim to emotional security, to a sense of belonging, to love, comes at great cost to women (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991, p. 57). A major thrust of women’s activism in India, therefore, from the 1970s onwards, has been to campaign for, among other issues, legal reform around gender-based violence. Although the contemporary women’s movement’s efforts in this direction were visible even in the early years of its activism, the Supreme Court judgment in the Mathura rape case, between 1979 and 1980, widespread media coverage of the incident in the period and women’s organised agitation against sexual violence against women brought public attention to the issue of gender-based violence (Phadke, 2003).

In the 1980s, the women’s movement articulated a parallel demand for legal protection for women from domestic violence. Prior to 1983—which is when Section 498A was added to the IPC—instances of violence against women within the family were addressed by invoking general laws on murder, abetment to suicide, wrongful confinement, etc. (Mukherjee, 2007). A crucial intervention of feminist activism with respect to violence faced by women was to show its connection with the dowry problem, sex selection and governmental population policies (Khullar, 2005, p. 25). Discussions around dowry-related violence led to the amendment of the Dowry Prohibition Act in 1986, which increased punishment and made dowry demand a non-bailable offence. Responding to further agitation by women’s groups protesting the limitations of Section 498A—that it does not ensure women’s right to shelter in her marital home, or provide compensation for injury—in 2005, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act was introduced.

Women’s groups in India have raised the problem of sexual harassment at the workplace since the early 1980s. However, it was with the Supreme Court ruling in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan in 1997 that the problem received significant public attention. In its judgment, the apex court of the country made it obligatory for every employer, in the organised and unorganised sectors, to evolve a policy in accordance with prescribed guidelines to combat cases of sexual harassment at the workplace.

As this greatly abbreviated catalogue of activism in the contemporary women’s movement demonstrates, contentious struggle with various state actors has resulted in some concrete changes in public policies gover-ning gender relations. ² Regular media coverage of women’s constraints in a patriarchal social order and efforts to undo these restrictions have brought women’s issues into public focus in an unprecedented way. Indeed, as Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana (1994, p. 93) point out, ‘Suddenly “women” are everywhere’, and go on to ask, ‘How might we “read” the new visibility of women…. What does it represent?’ My contention is that the very formation of men’s rights groups at this time is itself one reading of the presence of women and women’s issues in the public domain. Organised as counter to feminism and women’s movements, men’s rights groups are centrally concerned with mobilising public opinion and symbolic resources to roll back the small gains that have accrued to women as a result of decades of activism. What is distinctive about this backlash against the successes of women’s struggles, as I noted earlier, is its orchestrated foregrounding of ‘heterosexual’ masculine identity. It is this that distinguishes the formation of men’s rights groups from other resistances to feminist demands in the past and in the present moment. This idiosyncrasy, it seems to me, allows us to read the emergence of men’s rights groups as indicative of a ‘crisis tendency’ in the contemporary gender order in India.

R.W. Connell (1995), in what has been an important contribution to the field of masculinity studies, offers the concept of crisis tendency as a way of identifying disruptions in, and therefore avenues for transforming, relations between and within genders. Connell (1995, p. 84) explains that distinct from commonsensical refrains of ‘crisis of masculinity’, ‘the theoretical term “crisis” presupposes a coherent system of some kind, which is destroyed or restored by the outcome of the crisis’. Masculine identity in being always already insecure, ontologically, cannot be thought of as being in crisis only at particular moments in history; rather masculinity needs constant affirmation precisely because it is always in crisis. Connell argues that we may, on the other hand, speak of tendencies of crisis of a gender order as a whole, and their implications for masculinities. A strong movement towards the emancipation of women, he suggests, is one provocation for the emergence of crisis tendencies in an existing gender order (Connell, 1995, p. 85).

I will argue that the changes that I have outlined in the preceding sections have, in particular instances, partially undermined some men’s patriarchal privileges. For example, every time that a husband and his family are arrested for alleged domestic violence, patriarchal understandings that (a) men have the sanction to assault their wives and (b) the state should not intervene in domestic disputes are challenged. According to the National Family and Health Survey (2006), 71 per cent of interviewed men and 41 per cent women said that beatings were justified as punishment for lapses in women’s actions like disrespecting in-laws and being negligent about household work and child care (Patel and Shah, 2011). More recently, UNICEF’s Global Report Card on Adolescents 2012 revealed that 57 per cent of adolescent boys in India think a husband is justified in beating his wife. The point in referring to these surveys is to clarify that the patriarchal expectation from men is 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 criminalised for actions proper to their gender roles. When I asked activists for their reactions to the idea of patriarchy, many said that if patriarchy did really exist, so many men and their families would not be arrested in ‘false cases’. We miss a crucial point if we expend our entire effort in examining the veracity of this claim, because after all, any ideology is always ‘more than a mere lie’ (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991). Rather, it may be more useful to approach these claims as being predicated on a particular feeling rather than on actuality. In doing so, it becomes possible to understand that for these men, the existence of a set of 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. A crisis tendency is therefore produced not so much in a type of masculine identity, but in the ideology of male supremacy. The formation of men’s rights groups is expressive of a collective attempt to grapple with this momentarily weakened legitimacy of patriarchal masculinity.

I must hasten to clarify that the slippages in patriarchal order induced by laws against gender-based violence have not necessarily been wholly liberating for women. While the sanction for male violence may have been attenuated in particular instances by the promulgation of laws such as Section 498A of the IPC, the workings of other patriarchies in the long continuum of events related to violence (for example, the behaviour of state actors in police cells) frequently impede gender justice. Feminist ethnographies of family courts and police cells reveal that in most cases, ‘the process against violence becomes rendered a mere strategy … [and] the fundamental protection recognised in S498 is sacrificed in favour of achieving sustenance goals’ (Basu, 2006, p. 72).

If we read the formation of men’s rights groups as a collective response to an emergent crisis tendency in the contemporary patriarchal social order, it is relevant to ask what factors have facilitated the organised form in which this male resentment has been expressed. I tackle this question in the following subsection.

The Expansion of NGOs and the Discourse of Rights

The budget allocated to the voluntary sector in the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985–1990) marked a major shift in state response to NGOs in India. Five times larger than the allowance provided in the previous plan, this increase in financial assistance signalled another change in NGO–state relations: from silent partnership with a Nehruvian agenda between 1947 and 1966, through the many regulatory mechanisms to curb voluntary collectives between 1966 and 1989, to an emerging possibility of partnership in development work at the contemporary moment (Ray and Katzenstein, 2005). The increase in state and foreign donor funding in the late 1980s expanded further in the 1990s and led both to a proliferation of NGOs in the country and a widening of the range of issues that they undertook. In this period there was a steady growth in bilateral and multilateral aid to NGOs working on issues ranging from health and environment to rural and women’s development. Foreign funding of NGOs between 1991 and 2000, for example, grew at an annual rate of 13.63 per cent (Kudva, 2005). Economic liberalisation in India, therefore, has been attended by what has often been called the ‘NGO-fication of civil society’, a process which has sidelined more protest-oriented forms of reacting to social problems (Ray and Katzenstein, 2005, p. 9). Indeed, the idiom of revolution has been replaced by a language of empowerment and rights, posited as more realistic goals for citizens in a constitutional democracy (Ray and Katzenstein, 2005). Importantly, most contemporary practices of rights articulation now take the associational form of NGOs. As Upendra Baxi (2006, p. 60) puts it, ‘The impact of the NGOs on the making and working of human rights is so considerable that contemporary human rights may remain unintelligible outside their networked practices.’

SIFF and its partner organisations, unlike some of the older harassed husbands’ groups, have utilised the political spaces opened up by these developments. Like other so-called new social movements, they have been able to deploy a vocabulary of human rights, of democratic entitlement, of citizens’ action, of state accountability, and ground these articulations in civil society by forming closely networked non-governmental groups. Indeed, a significant contribution of social movements, both old and new, has been to make human suffering visible and suggest ways to ameliorate it (Baxi, 2006). Men’s rights groups have borrowed this language of social suffering and empowerment to diagnose problems in gender relations and give voice to their particular agenda. The task of ‘making visible’, however, raises complex questions of representation, and thus, of power. It is, therefore, of some significance that in giving expression to their scripts of male suffering, men’s rights activists exploit the idiom used by women’s groups to represent patriarchal discrimination. For instance, the characterisation of women as vengeful mercenaries and men as hapless victims (frequently denoted in posters as dogs) who need legal rights to protect them from outrageous demands of maintenance, emblematises a perverse reversal of language that one would ordinarily associate with women’s groups working to eradicate dowry harassment (Basu, 2006, p. 50).

This reversal of language, it seems to me, reflects a politics of rights enunciation that merits some attention. Much of modern history has been witness to the use of universality to advance violently exclusionary agendas. As Karl Marx reminds us, ‘What is named as universal is the parochial property of the dominant culture’ (quoted in Baxi [2006, p. 160]). It is through a language of universalism that dominant ideology often projects the interests of particular groups as generally true or beneficial (Mutua, 2004). Marking the particularities of differentiated identities, then, has been one way in which an affront to claims of universality has been organised. If the dominant speaks in the language of universality, the mode of production of men’s rights, however, creates a new idiom for patriarchal power speak. Here, we encounter a dominant social group that disavows its superordinate position to claim a particularity through which its dominance can be reasserted. This hegemonic move may be clarified in the following way: the rights of ‘Man’—the universal human subject—are temporarily renounced in favour of the rights of ‘men’—gendered beings—in order to reinforce a patriarchal social arrangement. The articulation of men’s rights strategically deploys the ‘metaphor of the victim’ (Mutua, 2002, p. 27) to present husbands as innocent and defenceless in the face of a persecutory legal and political environment, and therefore, deserving of state protection. In other words, the demand for rights, in relation to a social group to which it is opposed, becomes, in its intended effect, rights-denying.

It is important to note that most of the members of men’s rights groups betray a deep scepticism about the sphere of formal politics. As many activists told me, ‘We have no party affiliations. This is simply because nowadays it is very fashionable to talk about women’s rights; that gets you the vote. All the parties we approached said that no votes are to be won by talking about men’s rights.’ Men’s rights groups’ reservation about party affiliation, then, is more an outcome of failed strategy than an ideological suspicion. Some activists confessed that if any party supports their cause, they would be happy to endorse it. The appeal of civil society, as we know, is closely related to disenchantment with the beneficent role of the state. It is in the present context when state support seems uncertain that civil society, consisting of voluntary organisations, the so-called ‘third sector’, emerges for men’s rights advocates as a sphere of solidarity, where the struggle for men’s rights can be effectively waged. By forming these non-profit collectives, advocates of men’s rights engage with a state power, which, under the aegis of feminist activism, they feel is working against them. Furthermore, the kind of associational life which voluntary organisations make possible enables affective ties which provide emotional support to these men charged with crimes against women.

SIFF’s chief modus operandi has been to encourage the creation of registered men’s rights groups in all major cities and suburbs of the country and itself operate as a nodal point, linking these local chapters to one another through Internet technologies and annual national meets. In the following subsection, I examine the role that the availability of the Internet has played in the emergence and workings of men’s rights groups.

Wired Activisms

Internet services came to India, in 1986–1987, through funding by the United Nations (UN) in the form of the Education and Research Network. In 1994 the UN funding ended, and in the following year the government started Internet services through Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) However, VSNL’s inability to deal with technical problems and provide adequate customer support, at a time when India was rapidly integrating itself within the global economy, led to the entry of private-sector operators in the field (Mehta, 2001). The then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s decision to constitute an information technology (IT) task force in 1998 facilitated the expansion of Internet services in the country (Mehta, 2001). As per the recommendations of the task force, (a) local access to the Internet was to be made available from anywhere in the country (a decision that promoted the proliferation of cybercafés), (b) authorised cable television operators would be allowed to supply Internet connections without additional licences and (c) VSNL was to withdraw its monopoly over the international gateway for the Internet (Mehta, 2001). Since the turn of the century, the number of Internet users in India has grown steadily. According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India Report 2008, there were 42 million active Internet users in urban India in that year. The corresponding figure for active Internet users in rural India was 3.3 million. The total number of Internet users in the country in November 2011 grew to 121 million. ³

In India, as in most parts of the Western world, the so-called Internet revolution has added new dimensions to the forms of popular contention, particularly those engineered by the middle classes. By circumventing the constraints of physical space and time, the Internet has enabled social movements to disperse ideas of protest far and wide. Alok Gupta (2005, p. 138) writes, ‘The Internet revolution broke all records for the gay movement, just by the large numbers of men who accessed gay spaces through the web and came in touch with the community.’ Writings on queer activism in India show that for middle- and upper-middle-class English-speaking gay men, the Internet has been the chief avenue by which alignment with a global gay identity has been established. More recently, in February 2009, ‘The Pink Chaddi Campaign’ received widespread media coverage and was generally regarded as exemplary of what can be achieved through online activism, albeit within a specific class location.

Structural explanations for the emergence of collective action stress the importance of pre-existing communication networks. The creation myth of SIFF hinges on the coming of the Internet to the Indian middle class and the modes of collective politics that it has facilitated. ‘Ours started as an Internet movement,’ most of my respondents informed me. Indeed, the story of the origin of this species is not contested, indicative of a narrative fidelity that is crucial to group making. The story that was unanimously recounted to me follows this sequence—an angry post by a harassed husband, picked up by others similarly victimised, followed by regular online exchanges, formation of a Google group, increasing membership, culmination in the establishment of SIFF. The new forms of communication technology heralded by the coming of the Internet to India at the turn of the 21st century allowed SIFF to forge networks between local chapters—a vital task in solidarity building—that had not been possible for the older men’s rights groups in the country. Regular online conversation between different chapters—on tactics of recruitment, strategies and ideas of protest, articulation of claims and other collective action imperatives—augmented the transition of men’s rights groups from mere local irritants to a social formation that could realistically crave the heady appellation of ‘movement’. Not only was the target group of men’s rights collectives male IT professionals who have a regular online presence, but also practical tasks such as designing and maintaining websites were allotted to these men who had the required technical expertise.

The objective of men’s rights groups has been to ensure that their contact details and helplines show up each time someone searches for Section 498A on Google. Through their websites, blogs and online discussion groups, they have been able to reach middle-class men across the country and endow individual experiences with the import of a social malaise. An essential ingredient for the formation of group identity is the recognition of an individual problem in social terms. One way in which this recognition is collectively realised is through communal voicing and performances of ritual practices of solidarity (Eyerman, 2006). The Internet, in bringing together middle- and upper-middle-class men from different parts of the country, became the primary site where the sense of a collective identity was forged. By sharing their stories in blogs, videos and online meetings it now became possible to weave together individual experiences of men through a connecting narrative of victimhood.