By Pawan Kumar
In Indian law and public discourse, the term “gender” has come to be used as shorthand for women, a necessary linguistic shorthand, considering that women have been systematically excluded from public life, law, and policy. Years of feminist activism rightfully turned the spotlight on women’s lived realities, leading to pioneering gains, Vishaka guidelines, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, and the establishment of the National Commission for Women (NCW) in 1992.
But as this corrective model ripens into abiding policy structure, we usually notice the unwished-for byproduct: an asymmetrical system that gives precedence to women’s concerns even as it invisibly men’s gendered vulnerabilities. This is not to contend that men suffer equivalently with women or in equivalent fashion. Instead, the fact that no institutional framework exists committed to articulating and addressing men’s gender-based suffering points to a blind spot of constitutional significance in our commitment to equality under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution.
Constitutional Justice
Constitutional justice is never simply corrective; it is expansive. It is not only the State’s responsibility to restore past injustices, but also to accept present harms, wherever they arise. Indian men particularly those beyond the reach of urban privilege are subjected to a continuum of gendered harms that lie beyond formal attention: high rates of suicide, insufficient mental health facilities, disenfranchisement of parents in child custody cases, guilt presumption when there are disputes in the home, and the virtual total lack of male victims of sexual or domestic violence finding redress. The National Crime Records Bureau, across the board, reports that more than 70% of suicides are committed by men, making this, far from an exception, but a structural failure, screaming for institutional recognition.
These facts cannot be turned into fringe arguments or anomalies in policymaking. They are pieces of a larger moral puzzle. If, say, men are killing themselves through suicide for unattended trauma or marital collapses, should that not activate State responsibility rather than simple social sympathy? If men are losing children in court through motherly stereotype judgments, should that not activate legal recourse? If men wrongly accused of cruelty are collateral damage in a system meant to safeguard women, should that activate concern for individual due process? In each of these instances, gendered bias is not an aside; it is the narrative.
The Need for A National Commission for Men
This implies the institutional analogue of the NCW: the National Commission for Men (hereinafter, NCM). Well short of being a competitive or combative claim, this is a request for institutional equivalence of empathy and equality of structural humanness. As with the NCW, the advocated NCM would not rival women’s achievements but co-write them. It would be a statutory organisation to gather data on male issues, study new trends in male distress, guide Parliament and state governments on gender-sensitive bills, and offer redressal of grievances across sectors: mental health, family law, criminal justice, jobs, schools, and homes.
Critics tend to suspect a backlash. They find men’s advocacy as a foreshadowing of misogyny or right-wing backlash. But the demand for an NCM is based on constitutional morality and empathy, not entitlement or identity politics. A feminist ethic based on universal justice recognises that patriarchy also ties men into the roles of brutal strength, emotional repression, and ferocious independence and hurts them too in profound ways. For men to suffer from loneliness, psychic trauma, spurious criminal accusations, or parental rejection is not paradoxical if we view justice as flexible and not rigid.
Worldwide, societies are coming to appreciate this complexity. Australia’s National Men’s Health Strategy incorporates suicide prevention and mental health outreach. The UK has agencies that assist male victims of domestic abuse. Canada integrates grievance gathering involving men into family law. These actions have not rolled back women’s rights if anything, they have embedded integrity and empathy into systems that deal with injustice with subtlety, not caricature.
An NCM in India would not mimic these institutions but innovate a Global South-first approach based on constitutional sensitivity, intersectionality, and democratic pluralism. It would be institutionally responsible, legally authorised, and empirically informed. Its work would involve researching male suicides and isolation, exploring child custody bias, assisting male sexual violence victims, making procedural recommendations for preventing false accusations, promoting mental health infrastructure specific to men and boys, investing in emotional literacy in schools, and investigating and repairing the harms of toxic masculinity.
Notably, the Commission would also address marginalized men Dalit, tribal, queer, migrant, and differently-abled whose pain is heightened by oppression on multiple levels. Without this attention, policy threatens to write a monologue in which “man” can only refer to the privileged urban man and not the rural boy, the queer survivor, the caste-oppressed father.
Conclusion
Critics will inevitably demand: “Why men now? ” The response is that justice is never about parity of suffering, but integrity of institutions. India ensured the inclusion of Article 15 (3) in the Constitution, created the NCW when women’s rights were invisible; they are still visible today because women’s commissions define legislation, policy, and culture. Men’s vulnerabilities are still invisible, exactly because they do not have an institutional voice. The NCM does not insist on rationing suffering, but noticing it. It does not seek dominance, but dignity.
It does not require entitlement, but responsibility. The NCM is not a quest for grievance politics; it is a quest for universal concern. It is not a competition; it is a completion. The Commission would be India’s response to loneliness, emotional breakdown, legal erasure, and male suffering, couched in terms of the expectation of resilience. India would assert that all suffering counts not identically in origin, but identically in redress. The road to gender justice is not through competition but through care. The National Commission for Women was a trail-blazing institution not because it granted women special privileges, but because it granted victims a public voice. The NCM would do the same for men. In a democratic republic dedicated to pluralism and equality, justice can never be a limited resource. Rather, it must be expansive, comprehensive, and responsive. Today, thousands of Indian men are dying in silence because there is no room to speak.
The National Commission for Men is not a right, it is an ethical imperative, a last stroke in a painting of justice incomplete without it.
—The writer teaches at the Amity Law School, Amity University, Noida
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