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There was a recent suicide in India by a fairly competent ML engineer due to divorce rape. He uploaded his note and a 90-minute video on rumble for everyone to see where he detailed how the Indian legal system ensured he dies. The note is in English, the video in Hindi. Twitter has some tweets that give you some details in case you want a quick summary, this, this, this and it even got mainstream coverage. You can read more about the MRA fold run in india by following this lady.
Marriage here are extra fucked. If the wife commits suicide in the first 7 years, the groom and his family get charged. Similarly, the bride can always file the dowry act and get the groom and his family jailed. Since this is India, most of these cases are just women fucking over the guy since this is a low-trust society, this is despicable given these cases make actual events of barbarism harder to punish due to long backlogs.
In this case, the judge wanted the guy to pay a few hundred thousand dollars, not rupees, and asked the victim to pay her 5 hundred thousand inr (6k usd). Cases here are stuck in judicial purgatory, no one trusts or has ever trusted the judiciary and most if not everyone runs under the belief that bribing is the only sane option. Our victim here directly named the judge, his wife and wrote a section dedicated to his young son who wont get to have his dad around.
I am uploading some parts of his harrowing note in English for the benefit of other mottizens. I am unmarried and my mother always warned me of such things even as a child, though I am quite aware of how grim things can be, I found this to be fairly depressing.
What's the incident rate of men in these situations killing their wives and their wives' families? A light Wikipedia search and then a couple questions at Grok turned up nothing specific.
No data available on this but I'd assume fairly low since those who get in these situations are mostly white collar types who live far away from violence in any capacity.
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I've noticed a trend lately where TLC's on the culture war roundup are increasingly dominated by Indian issues and things that only Indians would be concerned about, and it’s becoming hard to ignore. I don't believe it's malevolent for Indian users to bring up topics relevant to their country, however there’s a real risk that the entire site starts to tilt toward Indian concerns, removing what was once sacred about this place. (Sheer volume notwithstanding)
I hate to say it, because I do sympathize with and appreciate our Indian brothers, but it is something we probably need to guard against. It has destroyed other communities.
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This only presages what's gonna happen to the whole of the internet in the next decade and a half. Both India and China on their own have more people than the entire western world combined. Now China has language barriers but for India and associated countries the English speaking internet is fair game.
If anything this world is a more fair one than the one of the 2010s where the internet was dominated by the concerns of average residents of WEIRD countries which make up an even smaller percentage of humanity (at least before 2010ish you could reasonably say the Internet was where the Western elite congregated and they deserve a bigger megaphone by dint of their eliteness).
Alright, psychology and sociology 201 it is.
People get attached to things they like, especially if they've liked those things for a while and those things have given off indications of catering to them. They don't like it when those things drift away from them and start catering to others in preference to them. This is the emotion of jealousy (in the proper, original sense, not the pop-culture synonym for envy it's become) - what you have, you hold on to, and you don't want someone else to take it from you.
And, to be frank, there's some merit to this kind of jealousy. The ideal Internet is one where different subcultures can all have their own spaces, but those different subcultures are of vastly-different sizes. That means that with a naïve policy of "let everyone in and always cater to whoever's the biggest chunk of the userbase", niche subcultures cannot have an enduring space - they'll be locked in a cycle of "start forum just for them" -> "forum grows" -> "despite self-selection, most of the new members are from more popular subcultures due to order-of-magnitude size difference" -> "forum's membership statistics slowly drift" -> "forum becomes genericised" -> "original userbase becomes disillusioned and secedes" -> "start forum just for them". It is not unreasonable to want a permanent internet-home, and that necessitates breaking the cycle somewhere.
"Growth" of that sort is growth of the site but not expansion of the community - it's colonisation of the site by a different and larger community. Denigrating the original community for failing to welcome their own marginalisation is effectively asserting that they have no right to a community at all.
(Disclosure: This is a copypaste of two posts I made on Questionable Questing about the site SpaceBattles transitioning from a hard-SF-sperging forum to an anime-fanfiction forum, with some specifics stripped out. All my words, though. Personally not confident that "Indians on theMotte" risks turning into an instance of that pattern, for reasons others have noted.)
My response is that western normies are already colonizers who savaged the original founding population of the internet which was tech nerd elites. The Eternal September happened in 1993! The true founding community of the internet is long dead and control being wrested from low tier Westerners towards low tier non-Westerners will just be fair comeuppance for them destroying the thinking man's internet and reducing things to the lowest common denominator.
I am not dead. I think.
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Quora went down this way where all the productive people left once it became a mainstay for 90 iq south asians. @prungus had a decent point here with regards to the possibility of the discussion becoming too India-centric, themotte has Indians in the double digits so that is extremely unlikely to happen but it is a very real concern. There is no reactionary or rationalist sphere in India so this place will be fine lol. Seriously, you cannot compare the likes of Jonathan Bowden to anyone here in the past 100 years. I perosnally would not wish the forum to be run over by Indians either, I have been critical of mass migration and visa scams since the start.
You overestimate a few things. Ethnic conflicts in India are scrutinized much much more than in the west and there are not many smart people or any texts, ideologies that would lead to productive discussions on most topics.
Quora, IG, and twitter to an extent became worse ever since they eternal septembered by people from the third world, and not the good kind. The internet being monopolised by 5 firms leads to people trying their best to appeal to untapped markets. Moldbug on his appearance on Justin Murphys podcast said that he could not have written his stuff this decade as the blog is dead. There were independent well run forums 15-20 years ago, not anymore.
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Completely fair. I have posted about India thrice, twice if you talk about simply local events here. Indiaposting does get tiring.
My aim is mostly to point out some other worldly acts of social justice combined with corruption. I used to find headlines, absurd ones about courts in England letting go of obvious criminals due to these reasons, this is kind of like that.
Divroce rape is a very common thing, I learnt about it first from MRAs in the anglosphere. Never quite expected any news from my nation be talked about people beyond just the locals.
I wouldn't mind hearing more about gender dynamics in India, particularly as it relates to your personal experiences if you have anything more to share. It's admittedly pretty amusing to scroll through the twitter of 6FeetChadAryan and see beta vs. chad dynamics, gynocracy and boomers mentioned in between references to Hindu mythology like this. I'm curious about the references to Dowry Act. Are dowries still common, even in urban areas among upwardly mobile/educated people like the engineer in question?
Dowries are highly variable in commonality across India these days, and at least de jure illegal.
It's quite common to see them not even raised, but just as often, it's things like the family of the bride buying something along the lines of an apartment or a car for the new couple, or offering "gifts".
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I'll write something original soon then lol, they are fucked here
Very, earlier, you didn't have banks so a father would send his daughter off to get married and the division of property was only done among male heirs, dowry was money that was sent to help the bride and the groom out. Post 1947, traditional society broke down, dowry became more inflated so did wedding expenditure as people used them both to signal.
Nowadays it's still a thing, parents of the bride send money out of their own goodwill in a lot of cases but at the same time most cases of it are well and truly evil. Most people here aren't nice, they extort the bride so the laws are 100 percent in the right theoretically. It's that the low trust, scarcity based society leads to people literally scamming others.
In most urban upper middle class or higher cases, the dowry is voluntary and not a super significant amount of the girls parents assets. It's a way to signal status and many communities don't practice it. Otoh, urban middle class uses these laws the most for extortion.
Lol, Hindu twitter is not the smartest, it's quite stale but it's super funny at times. I used to be a hallowed anon poster until I quit in 2021 out of frustration.
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I don’t think I’ve noticed such. Maybe a relative increase due to the lull in American presidential politics? But no absolute flood.
I was gonna say, I think it's literally all because of the very OP of this TLC. Vanillasky posts a lot about India.
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As a user: Culture War is not unique to America. We welcome contributions from other countries, and have had a number of long-running contributions from England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, etc. I see no reason why Indian concerns should not be welcome here, nor any benefit to concerns about rate or volume of contributions by nation of origin generally.
The OP in particular seems directly relevant to both sides of the general debate over Feminism as an ideology. It seems obvious to me that the situation they're describing arrived through attempts to solve valid, legible problems identified by feminism, and is a demonstration of how Feminist solutions aren't sufficient in and of themselves.
Specifically, my understanding is that second/third world laws written by westerners to ‘protect women’ are often actual causes for serious complaint by men in countries like India and Mexico, where in the U.S. and Western Europe divorce rape mostly isn’t a thing and most other examples are things where someone has to get the short end of the stick.
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To steelman: There's an argument, and a pretty solid one, that SJ is mostly the same across US/England/Ireland/Canada/Australia/NZ/France/Germany/Scandinavia (as a product of its online emergence) - there's a lot of variation in the strength and some variation in the type of movements opposing SJ, but the issues are mostly the same. My understanding is that while there is some cross-pollination, India's culture wars are substantially different.
They aren't that different since humans share quite a bit and India was under British rule for a while whilst also having had a native morality not far off from the north west, closer to scandis than to ancient Greeks.
I mostly post non Indian stuff since India simply adopts and reacts to whatever happens in the west but there are some things where it's ahead, for instance one of the worst run not bioleninism infested state is named Bihar where transsexuals can get government to pay for gender reassignment surgery. NHS doing so or even the US having massive subsidies for this is an outcome I'd bet on if it isn't already there.
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Thanks. I do not want themotte to become an extension of Indian culture war or have a signficant presence either. I post some links mostly to show the downstream effects of the western world and its values. Divorce Rape is a very common threat that was introduced here by liberal secular influences.
Appreciate the sentiment. I think op was slightly worried since other places in the past got run over and not by the good kind of south asians. Median mottizen is a west dweller so an inkling towards matters closer to thier turf is understandable though I am fairly confident that this wont turn into indiachan.
Precisely. Most feminists motte and bailey around this, so I kinda saw this story as a universal thing. India explains the pitfalls of bioleninism better than the west, in ways that can also demonstrate the destructive potential of having rabid feminist laws and having a state interfering with your domestic matters. Spandrell in his essay on the post mortem of neo reaction noted that the allure of a "strong government" is frightening as of today with covid being a good demonstration of it. No matter where you live, governments will try to meddle with your life more and more, bureaucratic setups need to find more problems to justify their existence and increase their scope of power.
Power is like money, if you dont then someone else will grab it. It was quite common to see ludicrous statements and judgements from english courts on twitter where they would let some south asian rapist walk without proper punishment or go light on women. Its effects are literally seen in the opposite ends of the world thanks to globalisation and tech growth.
For what it's worth I appreciate that you post stories about India (and similarly I appreciate that @Folamh3 posts about Ireland). This site tends towards American events but that isn't inherent to its mission and I'm glad we get these perspectives on other parts of the world. It's true that sometimes I will scroll past posts about other countries because they aren't interesting to me, but the same is true just as often of the posts about America too.
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Is the judge offering to settle the case for just $6K? Surely this guy would have had $6K to make this go away? IMO it's not prima facie unreasonable for a divorce to split assets evenly if the couple has been together a long time, and presumably they had over $12k in assets.
Yeah, he certainly should, again it is just his side and he seemed to care a lot about doing the right thing after a point. I probably would have simply paid off the judge tbh so dunno why he would not. His family is yet to make a statement on this.
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The judge was requesting a bribe. Westerners really don't comprehend how corrupt third world nations are even when presented with an example of it in the most direct sense possible.
Third world bribery is hilariously different from first world bribery. A policeman shaking you down for a random traffic pit stop is unheard of in the developed world, whereas the networked corruption of opaque contracts and awards buried within bureaucratic legalese are a misty shadowland for third world.
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And to think that the previous generation of my family understood bribery vocabulary so well.
Anyway, giving the judge $6k to make it all go away still seems to make sense. When in Delhi, right?
Does the bribe actually work or does the Judge just take the money and then claim the other family paid more so you will need pony up some more?
Presumably, if the judge reneges on his side of the deal, he will torpedo his chances at getting future bribes.
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*requesting
Yep, good correction.
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I read it as a pure bribe ; in exchange for six thousand dollars she will try to limit the alimony and other claims, which are in the hundreds of thousands.
She can do a lot, convince the wife that she wont get much or the 6k might just be a beginning in a series of bribes. Judges here can do a lot, Indian courts have backlogs going back 80 years so not like it wil get checked. Everyone takes bribes and judgements many times are made on whims, this is seen as a fact of life here by everyone.
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An uncle of mine married a lady while they were both finishing up their engineering PhDs.
She was chronically depressed, and had even been started by my (gyno) parents on SSRIs for postpartum depression. When their kid was about 6 months old, she was alone at home and hanged herself. No note, it was a spur of the moment decision while their daughter slept next door.
I have absolutely no reason to think my uncle or his immediate family had anything to do with it. They were a happy couple, even while grappling with her mental health issues. As you've mentioned, the death of a wife within 7 years of marriage automatically warrants investigation*, and in this case, her side of the family were disgruntled and lodged charges, accusing him of instigating her suicide, while also asking for the custody of his daughter.
The legal system here is automatically, and intentionally, biased against men in such affairs. He was imprisoned while standing trial, a protracted affair, and a ruinous one for someone who had just started their own company and acquired a few sizable contracts. It took about a year for the charges to be dismissed and for him to see the light of day, but by then he was a broken man, and half a decade of work he'd put his blood and sweat into was gone with nothing to show for it.
This was all despite literally no evidence beyond the unfounded claims made by his in-laws, while he was able to show evidence of his wife's struggle with depression and get her doctors (including psychiatrists not in the family she was referred to) to testify.
Last time I saw him, he told me to:
A) Never get married B) Get out of this country while I still could
I'm not inclined to follow the first bit of advice, it was an unfortunate accident but he still had his life ruined because he was a man, and men are never above suspicion. The latter? You know where I am.
*A perennial headache when I was an intern at a government hospital. You had women dying shortly after childbirth, or because they got run over by a car, and yet it was automatically a case with medicolegal implications and a dozen times the paperwork for my sorry ass to handle.
I am very sorry to hear about that, losing your aunt and then seeing your uncle going through this is harsh. I hope he is doing better now.
Most here would not believe how backwards and bad laws and the entire judicial process can be for a man. India is a very low trust society, everything is broken.
Correct on the second count at least, you deserve better. I disagree with the first, I want to have kids, and I hope I can have biological kids of my own, having them out of wedlock is not ideal. I do get his point, my family has been involved in court cases that are laughably false for the past 6 decades if not more, people who go through the process suffer immensely, and the charges against him were severe too.
You did the right thing man, I will probably follow suit too.
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What are the marriage prospects for a divorced woman like this like in India? What motivation would she have for her alleged actions according to this guy?
Divorce isn't a social death sentence anymore. It's highly frowned upon, but can be forgiven if justifiable.
A cousin of mine got divorced (after marrying against family advice). She ended up marrying another divorcee and seems happy enough. That's usually the case, with divorcees marrying other divorcees.
Of course, big country, loads of variance, but you can put it behind you in most cases.
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Not that bad, you have a lot of poverty here and bangalore is very open minded
Many, the usual ones are money, some allege she wanted him to pour money into the ventures her family ran, the girl getting caught cheating is a big reason for such actions, not sure if that is a case here but these two are the main motivations, hers seems to be money.
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This immediately jumped out at me:
Is it common in India to use this kind of terminology?
Also the basis of the murder charge against him was humorous to me:
Is this actually treated as a legally plausible claim in India?
Yes, developing countries often have de jure law codes which are just ridiculously prima facie unfair to men surrounding things like that. Mexico has similar issues with its domestic violence laws.
Usually these laws are written by radical feminist activists from the west.
Incidentally, divorce/family laws of similar vein (i.e. practically written by feminist activists and applied very unfairly by a judiciary motivated to protect women at any cost) caused the most major fracture in Islamist politics in Turkey since Erdogan's rise 20+ years ago, with a promising new party (led by Erdogan's old mentor's son) spawning around it.
I don't think almost anyone in his cabinet personally would agree with these laws or their applications personally, but even after achieving near-dictatorship level control of the country, Erdogan and his Islamists have been seemingly powerless to stop this drift.
Non/anti-Western politics are often really brain-dead and are starved of human capital. They are really bad at actually articulating and planning for a society that escapes the slow but steady drift towards the latest Western fashions.
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no, not at all, this guy was upper middle class and up and likely fairly online and centrist
Yes, India is not for beginners
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I don't get it. How was she forcing him to pay her money? Was she just making up charges, and the corrupt legal system assumed he was guilty with no evidence?
yes
He would have to give a hefty alimony, the note describes a lot of it in great detail. You are charged with a criminal case and many times it is non-bailable. Courts here routinely give half baked decisions that you challenge in hgiher courts, I wish I was making this up.
could he fight back by charging her with random things? Or does the court only believe women?
Bioleninism explains India better than any other nation. The court is absolutely rigged lol, the actual law itself states that this stuff explicitly only works with genders, so if the girl does the same exact things, you have no laws of the same levels of harm to punish her.
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