MUMBAI: Rishi (name changed) was part of a yoga group that required him to arrive at the studio early on Sunday mornings and set up the mats and straps, blocks and bricks. It was a long commute from his home in Chembur to the studio in Malad when a friendly live-in couple Lina and Karan — also fellow yoga practitioners — opened up their home to him on Saturday nights to ease Rishi’s Sunday morning routine.It was on one such Saturday when Karan wasn’t home that Lina made advances on Rishi. Rishi gave in and both kicked off a consensual sexual relationship that continued for months. When Rishi realised that the relationship was going nowhere and wanted to marry another girl that he had met, Lina flew into a rage and then slapped rape charges against him.Rishi (30) was arrested overnight and spent a week in jail. The case dragged in court for three years until his acquittal in February 2018. But his life was shattered. He lost his job, friends and the confidence to face the world. “He came to us almost a year into the case when the main thing we did was provide emotional strength through counselling,” explained Amit Deshpande, who set up Vaastav Foundation “for preserving and protecting men’s rights” in 2014 after his personal battle against a “false litigation of domestic violence” that he fought and won.It is false cases like Rishi’s and Amit’s why men’s rights activists feel the need for “gender neutrality” to what they feel are “gender-biased” laws of the land.Most false cases that come their way are about dowry harassment and domestic violence, but there has been a surge in the number of consensual sex-turned rape allegations. “Most of the times these cases become extortion tools and although the acquittal rate in rape cases is 74%, stretched litigation destroys a man’s reputation,” said Deshpande, who also runs a suicide helpline for men in distress.“Once such a case is filed, a man is persecuted at every level — police, judiciary, media. Friends, family and acquaintances look at him with suspicion. It is a myth that women don’t harass men. If we have to work towards equal rights, we have to work on legal recourse for men too. There has to be some penalty for the complainant and a system to withhold the identity of the accused until proven guilty in order to deter and weed out false accusers.”While organisations like Deshpande’s are conscious of the #MeToo movement and the atrocities done to women, there is growing concern for men facing false accusations and the absence of emotional and legal support. Instances of men being harassed may be few, but when they emerge they are rarely treated with seriousness, feel activists. And that forms the thrust of the men’s rights movement in India, a fairly recent phenomenon.It started out as a Yahoo group in 2005 with men banding together to discuss and debate the IPC’s Section 498A (dowry harassment), which, despite its good intent, saw husbands getting thrown into jail over petty domestic disputes. Today activists have branched out into 45 individual men’s rights NGOs that operate under the umbrella of Save Indian Family.Their cause is not about antagonism to feminism, insists men’s rights activist Captain Arun Sethi. “We’re not saying, don’t protect women, but there should be checks and balances. It’s more about a draconian law that violates the already shrinking space of men’s rights in marriage and its open-endedness makes men very vulnerable,” said the 76-year-old who found himself behind bars with charges of dowry harassment after 21 years of marriage following a dispute with his wife. “I lost my reputation, my job, my money fighting the case. Who wants to employ a jailbird?”Deshpande said a primary demand is “gender neutrality in gender-biased laws under Sec 354 (outraging the modesty of a woman) and Sec 376 (rape) of the IPC”. “Any discussion, disagreement or argument that may not have amicable results has the potential to become a case of Sec 354; we have people talking about how these laws have spoilt gender relationships within the office environment.”Barkha Trehan, who formed Purish Aayog last year “after the government refused to institute one” cited several accounts where a man’s complaint about harassment and torture was met with police apathy. She has been rallying for a “National Commission for Men (NCM)”. Trehan is not alone. In 2014, the National Coalition for Men — a forum of 50 organisations — launched its own ‘Men-ifesto’ expressing concern over the growing number of “innocent men” falling victim to “gender-biased” laws.Anant Kumar, a Fulbright scholar and associate professor at Xavier Institute of Social Service, Ranchi, published a paper last year on the “rationale” and “consequences” of an NCM. He wrote that atrocities on men by women cannot be ignored, but an NCM might not be the only solution as it cannot be ruled out that this body might increase confrontation between itself and the National Commission for Women (NCW). “To prevent this,” he suggested, “the government could restructure and rename the NCW to make it gender-neutral”.