In India, a woman is always innocent until she’s proven guilty and a man is always guilty until he’s proven innocent.
You all might have heard this sentence many times and didn’t take it as a big deal to do something about it, but have you ever wondered that to what extent this tradition can ruin someone’s life. Well, you wouldn’t have, neither you’ll until the victim is you or someone close to you. Whenever there is a conflict between a man and woman, a presumption pops out that the male has to be wrong. Before the judiciary could decide anything, the man is already guilty in society’s opinion as it is much faster than the former. Society, a necessary evil, is the ultimate court of judgment but unfortunately not justice because the facts do not matter here; all that matters is, man is of dominant gender; he must have done something evil. Our society neglects that dominance is not a characteristic of a particular gender; instead, it’s one individual’s ability to subdue the latter, either with power or with the very rights granted to protect them.
An established principle of the judiciary says that even if a hundred accused are released, no innocent should be punished. Yet, a very disappointing story is going viral on social media. Vishnu Tiwari,43, of Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh, imprisoned in 2001 for life, spent 20 years of his life in prison for a crime he never committed. Vishnu was 23 when he was falsely accused of a rape case due to a minor land conflict. In all these years, Vishnu suffered the loss of his whole family. In 2020, jail authorities reached the state legal service authority to appeal in the high court, which finally resulted in Vishnu being innocent. He might have won against the incapability of the Indian judicial system, but he has more significant challenges to face ahead; livelihood and survival. Survival in a society full of opinions, some sympathizing with his story, after he has lost his everything and everyone, while some still doubting his innocence. While the court just apologized for this small inconvenience, it caused to that MAN.
One more case of presuming a man as a criminal and a woman as a victim is trending nowadays. Kamaraj, a delivery boy of Zomato was accused, on a social media handle by a woman with 55000 followers under her influence, of assaulting a female customer. The woman claims that he punched her in the face after she tried to return the late delivered food. But the facts suggest a different story, Kamaraj is one of the highest-rated delivery men of Zomato and has made over 5000 deliveries. In an interview, Kamaraj put forward his side of the story explaining that due to traffic problems he was unable to make the delivery on time; the woman took the food and then refused to pay for the order, he pleaded with the woman to pay for the order but was abused. When he tried to take back the food to get it returned, the woman resisted and accidentally hit herself on the nose with her finger ring, which led to bleeding.
The woman used this injury as an advantage and tried to get sympathy and support from people depicting the incident as an assault against her. Kamaraj was arrested shortly for this fabricated incident. In the beginning, Kamaraj was criticized all over social media and presumed guilty, but later company’s co-founder took a stand on his behalf while conducting an investigation as well as paid for the medical expenses of that woman. Kamaraj is temporarily suspended until the investigation team finalizes its report.
Well, through these incidents, I do not mean that all the allegations that are made against men are always fake. What we need to know is that there is always some small part of the community which performs such cheap acts and the whole community has to suffer the consequences.
Hence, instead of presuming something, society must wait for law enforcement to investigate the incident and let the slow, inaccurate and incapable courts of India give their verdict.
