A half-ablaze pair of white men’s underwear is a striking visual and one that made its rounds on Indian social media in early 2024 under the hashtag #चड्डी_जलाओ_पुरुष_बचाओ (literal translation, “Burn Underwear, Save Men”). The catchy slogan accompanied protests by men’s rights groups who burned and mailed their underwear to politicians to oppose what they regarded as anti-male and women-centric government policies.
Later that year, Bangalore-based software engineer Atul Subhash’s suicide reignited debates about gendered legislation in India. Subhash left behind a 34-page suicide note and an 84-minute-long video accusing his wife of harassment and the judiciary of corruption. What followed was multiple Men’s Rights Activists framing Subhash’s death as evidence for domestic violence and dowry laws victimizing men. A co-founder of Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF), for instance, described Subhash’s suicide note as a “manifesto in the fight for men’s rights.” Such framing by men’s rights activists can convert a personal tragedy into evidence, promoting overgeneralization from a single case to sweeping claims about men’s alleged exploitation by the Indian society and judiciary.
Furthermore, SIFF’s public communications make the men’s rights activists’ ideology explicit. For instance, SIFF’s FAQ section portrays feminism as hostile, illogical, and fraudulent, claiming that “most feminists are intellectually challenged individuals, with very little academic grounding,” and asserting that Indian society is treacherously anti-male. SIFF represents the broader male victimhood narrative, which frames men as victims of a rigged system and externalizes the blame onto feminists and advocates of women’s empowerment.
This narrative is not limited to India. Research on anti feminist websites across multiple countries found that Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) often create an “us vs them” mindset where men are presented as a unified in-group and feminists as an out-group enemy. The rationale? The idea that feminism is a zero-sum game where women's empowerment only occurs at men’s expense. In the Indian context, this logic translates into the claim that legal institutions deliberately side with women in cases involving rape accusations, child custody, and divorce. Furthermore, feminism is cast as an imperial project imported from the West and responsible for “the decline of Indian society.” Some organizations go on to state that the Western media exaggerates news about rape cases because of their anti Indian propaganda.
This sense that the Indian judiciary, legislature (and society at large) demonize men is reinforced repeatedly via mobilizations by MRA - both online and offline. A critical talking point is the legal and judicial status of the controversial marital rape exception under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which states that “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.”
Activists have challenged this exception as patriarchal and a threat to women’s autonomy. Yet, men’s rights groups maintain a rigid position against the criminalization of marital rape, arguing that it could be misused to implicate men in custody and divorce cases. Consequently, Twitter witnessed # MarriageStrike trending with men threatening to go on a strike against marriage for a year if the courts continue to treat them as “2nd class citizen” and continue providing women with more power in marriages.
These campaigns do not exist in a vacuum. Men’s rights activism is a fragment of the manosphere (a loosely interconnected network of websites, blogs, and social media forums focused on masculinity, men’s rights, and an anti feminist ideology). Interestingly, across the manosphere, the men’s rights groups, and the far right, feminism is framed as a phenomenon that injures men by eroding traditional families, heterosexuality, and softening masculinity. In such spaces, men form an identity around the shared experience of being wounded and oppressed. This leads to what sociologists call “aggrieved entitlement”, where men feel entitled but don't receive what they expected, causing humiliation. Online, the result is often the spread of misogynistic content, harassment, and in some cases, explicit calls to violence.
Research finds that technology-facilitated gender-based violence shows that women, especially those belonging to minority groups, including Dalit, LGBTQ+, and Muslim communities in India, are disproportionately targeted via stalking, doxing, non-consensual distribution of intimate images, and morping. Case in point: The “Bois Locker Room” incident that sparked outrage after a group of teenage boys created a vulgar Instagram group chat exchanging nude pictures of underage girls and joking about sexual assault.
Another case illustrates the overlap between misogyny and right-wing extremism. In 2021, more than 80 women found themselves being auctioned on an app called the “Sulli deals.” The app creators posted publicly available photos of prominent Muslims journalists and activists and invited users to buy a “Sulli,” a crude slang used by right-wing Hindu trolls to describe Muslim women
Taken together, these cases highlight the dangers of the Indian manosphere. By painting feminism as a threat and men as victims of a structurally anti-male society, these manosphere communities can normalize misogyny online and offline while downplaying the scale and severity of sexual violence against women in India. This is particularly troubling in a country where a rape case is reported every 15 minutes. The Indian manosphere is also distinct from its Western counterparts in terms of the intersectionality of misogyny in the Indian context. Hostility towards women here isn’t just influenced by her gender but also by her religion, marriage status, and caste. Therefore, the Indian manosphere, apart from reinforcing patriarchy, also reinforces structural systems of social exclusion. If left unchecked and further amplified through social media, such grievance narratives can make violence against women seem justified. This has far-reaching consequences for researchers and policymakers. For instance, it highlights the need for stronger media literacy, raises important questions about the role of social media platforms in moderating harmful misogynistic speech, and the necessity for greater platform accountability. Lastly, it may also inspire awareness campaigns aimed at equipping survivors of online harassment and digital violence with legal support for redress available in India.
Divyanshi Raturi
