One can simply give thumbs up for their confidence levels and their determination to see that their voices are heard. MARD (Mera Adhikar Rashtriya Dal), a party which has been working for the rights of men, will be fielding six candidates, including two from Lucknow, in the Vidhan Sabha elections despite the fact that the party had secured a mere 1,000 votes for its two candidates who stood for the Lok Sabha polls in 2019 when the party first came to the forefront.
President of the party, Kapil Mohan, says that they have no option but to fight for the rights of the men when the laws are getting more and more women centric.
“We formed a party because we want to have the power to stop the process of formation of such laws and thereby save those who are affected by the laws which are increasingly pro-women. This does not mean that we are against women but we want to fight for our own protection,” he said.
Mohan said it was easy to make an allegation of rape these days.
He said that with the focus being on marital rape these days, it was a great cause of concern for men regarding its misuse. “Currently if there is a rape case the onus to prove it wrong is on the man but there is no law which punishes a woman who makes a false charge and something needs to be done about it because in case of marital rape there could be several false accusations,” he said.
In the MARD manifesto, it has been clearly stated that if the party comes to power it would start a ‘Men’s Power Line’, a ‘Men Welfare Ministry’, focus on ‘Beta Padhayae’, stress on jail until guilt is proved, bring in shared parenting law for marriage disputes, reservation of seats for men in government transport, make it mandatory for the police to wear ‘body worn’ with audio being kept live in public domain, ensure 50 per cent of the amount received after the death of a policeman or army man would be reserved for the children, 30 per cent of the aged parents and 20 per cent for the wife.
On being asked whether they saw themselves standing a chance, considering the whole focus was on the bigger political parties in the election, Mohan said, “Just because there are bigger political parties does not mean that we stop fighting elections. It is a matter of half of the population, if women form half the population, then men also form the other half. We just want to be heard,” he added.
He said that they had fielded two candidates in the Lok Sabha elections of 2019, one from Lucknow and the other from Varanasi. “When we stood for the elections for the first time we got 474 votes for our candidate in Lucknow which was a big thing for us because in our election meetings barely 150 would gather and in Varanasi we had secured 498 votes on EVMs and one postal ballot which was interesting itself because the numbers were equal to Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code against which we were fighting,” he said.
He said that one of their candidates had also contested for the by-election in 2020.
“For this election we are fielding six candidates -- one each from Bareilly, Rampur, Gorakhpur, Allahabad and two from Lucknow,” he said.
He admitted that their party was the first of its kind in the world.
Incidentally, he said that there was a woman candidate who would be also fighting the election from their party. “In the Lok Sabha elections of 2019, all the proposers for our candidate were women and the administration was quite surprised to see that. These women are working and professional women,” he added.
A businessman by profession, Kapil Mohan, who formed the party, will not be contesting from any seat.