Sexual Assault- The Untold Story

“Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is loved under the condition that he provides something”- Chris Rock

Ok, let me just clarify this before I see some green hair bob cut women shouting at me about supporting the criminals of these heinous acts. I with my absolute being hate rapists and sexual predators. And in the case of males, I advocate castration as a punishment for rape. But like everything, there is another side of this coin and I feel I should be the one to bring the spotlight to it.

So, what is the point I want to bring across? The misuse of the sexual assault and rape laws against men and the blatant misandry present in the Indian penal court regarding these matters. Let me explain before you go on a tangent and label me sexist. We all have heard about the Kabir Singh controversy yes! The argument that how dare Kabir slap periti in the same movie where earlier Preeti slapped Kabir but that was ok. How dare Kabir do the same to Preeti. But that is not my point, my point is most of you were up in arms with this being a huge point against the movie. But what I was astonished to see was no one did the same for Housefull-4 when Kriti Kharbanda’s character falsely accuses Bobby Doel’s character of rape and strongarms him into marrying her. But, it’s just a comedy movie bro, why so serious. Ha! The audacity to ask why so serious, I’ll tell that to you after you complete the blog. This scenario was not a joke for the following people, it completely shattered their life and scattered them to the wind.

 Do you know about Vishnu Tiwari? Well, let me tell you about him. He is a man from Lalitpur, Agra and he spent 20 years in prison on charges of rape, sexual assault, and criminal intimidation under the Indian Penal code. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was only 23 when all of this happened and he spent 20 grueling and ridicule-filled years in jail during which he lost all of his family to father time. The year he was jailed was 2000 and he was released in January of 2021. During his imprisonment, he was observed to be a mild-mannered man who loved his family. He tried to appeal to the high court in 2005 but that was the time when his father passed away so he dropped the idea.

 Finally, in 2020 he got a fair trial and was released based on the medical reports of the “victim” showed no injury in the genital area and the motive in form of property dispute. But did that matter to anyone. The answer – Nope! at the time people went “eew see this degenerate, he assaulted that poor woman and has the guts to deny it” “he should be hanged for doing such thing” “bechari usski to puri Zindagi barbad Kar di is karamjale ne”. they judged him but no one and I mean no one cared for the truth.

That is the case of misuse of the laws regarding rape and sexual assault. And this is not an isolated case these kinds of cases are dime a dozen in the country but they are not brought up by the media because “man bad, man rapist, a man not a victim”. Well, guess what! it worked and now thinking of rape there will never be a case where a man can be the victim.

According to National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 38,947 cases of rape were reported in India during the year 2016 out of which 10,068 about a quarter were cases where the woman accused the man of rape after the relationship was dissolved in hope to get back at the man for breaking the relationship.

 One such case is of Pavan Gupta, a man of 24 who was accused of raping his girlfriend, Geeta Jain for over 1 year after he dissolved his relationship with a said woman because his parents were forcing him to marry another and he did not want to disappoint them. Though he was found not guilty (not innocent never innocent but just not guilty) he lost his mother to a heart attack because of this accusation, his fiancée called off the wedding. He lost his job. And maybe even his will to live. These kinds of cases are very common and the main reason is the parents of the girls are not ready to accept that their child is sexually active and rather make their child a false victim of rape to hide their so-called “shame”.

A similar case was observed in Delhi in 2012, Yogesh Gupta, a 44 years old real estate agent got into trouble when he caught another employee embezzling company funds and threatened to tell everyone. The thief paid a woman to accuse him of rape charges and well for 8 months despite having C.C.T.V. footage he was harassed, his wife, his father, his children were the victim of the “civilized” society we all live in. Thinking about this case gives me goosebumps. The thought of doing something this deplorable to hide another deplorable act is just unthinkable.

You will find many such cases and even more are emerging day by day but what I want to emphasize is please, please think before you judge them. Even the articles from where I sourced the data in the end went and said that women are still the majority victims and I agree but they also discarded these cases as one-of-a-kind exceptions and moved on.

This is the ground report of the rape cases reported and as you can see most of the rape cases are false. Now, do you understand why I was so serious? Then please accept my humble request to always make sure the person is 100% guilty and please don’t become social justice warriors, we have court and law for that (however flawed it may be).

Ananya Agarwal