Atul Subhash death is a weapon for men’s rights activists. They don’t care about men’s lives

A conversation around men’s loneliness would require real work and courage. It’s much easier for Indian men to vilify women than to build genuine networks of support.

A candle light march was held for Atul Subhash at Jantar Mantar on 12 December | Source: X/@DeepikaBhardwaj

Atul Subhash seems to have received more solidarity in death than he likely got in life. 

In early December, Subhash, a 34-year-old deputy general manager at a Bengaluru tech firm, died by suicide. He left behind detailed allegations of harassment by his wife, Nikita Singhania, and her family.

Subhash alleged that Singhania and her family filed allegations of murder, domestic violence, dowry harassment, and financial exploitation against him. He also claimed that the judge hearing his case demanded a hefty bribe to settle matters swiftly. Singhania and her mother and brother have since been arrested in a case of abetment to suicide.

It’s clear from Subhash’s final notes that he was a man at the end of his tether. His pain was real, his desperation palpable. Yet within hours of his death, his personal anguish had already been conscripted into a larger war.

Almost on cue, the Avengers assembled. The men’s rights activists, the anti-Section 498-ers, the trad-wife fantasists, and the garden variety Right-wing misogynists, all formed an anguished overnight coalition. In a country where 20 women die every day in dowry-related incidents—murder and suicide—the death of a man is an outlier, and therefore, a gift to media outlets starved for novelty. The coverage was relentless, the tone fevered.

In the weeks since his death, Subhash has been transformed from a man in crisis into a martyr for a particular cause—a banner under which to rally against everything from alimony and child support laws to abortion and women in the workforce. We now have men on X, indistinguishable from 4Chan, calling for the return of Khap panchayats and advocating a close reading of the Manusmriti. 

They are exhorting other men to either stay away from marriage or—fed on a steady diet of American dramas—look for “prenups”. In the same breath where they complain about the supposedly widespread misuse of anti-dowry harassment laws, they are demanding dowry be made legal.

In this echo chamber, the loudest voices are not only suggesting that women’s rights be rolled back, but that their education and free will ought to be actively ignored. They want women to be forced to carry children and beaten to be kept in line. The not-so-loud ones, meanwhile, are filling up the mentions of women’s accounts, freely vending rape, mutilation, and death threats.

Reality check

I want to be absolutely clear about one thing: Atul Subhash’s death is an unequivocal tragedy. But the conversation following his death could have gone in any direction: Maybe a genuine questioning of mental health among men and what stops them from seeking help. About the crushing weight of our embattled legal system and how it can take down even the most fortuitous among us. About what it means to recalibrate expectations around the idea of an equal marriage in this day and age.

Instead, we have a garbage fire of performative outrage from the footsoldiers of the patriarchy. We’re witnessing a peculiar kind of brotherhood that awakens only when male pain can be transformed into ammunition against women’s rights. Subhash’s death has been cynically transformed into yet another weapon in the gender wars, wielded by those who claim to speak for men’s rights while showing remarkably little interest in men’s lives.

Not that the facts matter to those seeking only a weapon, but let’s take a brief look at what the data actually tells us. For all the thundering about the extensive misuse of laws by women, reality speaks differently. According to the National Family Health Survey, 80.1 per cent of women who faced violence by their current husbands never even reported it. Of those who did seek help, a mere 6.3 per cent approached the police. The world over, home is the unsafest place for women.

According to this report, “It is often claimed that more married men die by suicide because of false DV [domestic violence] cases. In fact, there is no category of suicide due to false DV cases in the NCRB. The category of marriage-related issues includes non-settlement of marriage, extra-marital affairs, dowry-related issues, divorce, etc. And it is family problems (not related to marriage) that constitute the biggest cause of suicide for men in India, for the period of 2017 to 2022, forming 30.8% of total suicides by men as compared to marriage-related issues (3.4%).”

The narrative of women eagerly rushing to file false cases crumbles in the face of these numbers. On the contrary, women undergoing divorce proceedings are routinely told to give up their claims to alimony or child support, in favour of an early settlement. Men’s rights activists love to cherry-pick statistics about low conviction rates, to shore up their argument that most cases are “false”—because it allows them to conveniently ignore the structural reasons behind them: hostile witnesses, familial pressure, flawed police investigation, and the labyrinthine delays of our legal system. Those are only up for debate when men die.

The deafening silence around what actually kills men speaks volumes about the nature of this supposed solidarity. When over 30 per cent of male suicides stem from family problems unrelated to marriage, where are the passionate calls for mental health support? Where are the viral threads about how traditional masculinity teaches men to bottle up their emotions until they explode?

What’s killing Indian men?

The truth is, Indian men exist in and repeat the same cycle of profound disconnection—from society, women, and other men—that governed their fathers and grandfathers. In these circles, any depth or emotional vulnerability is treated as a contagion. Therapy is still a dirty word, and introspection is for the weak.

Indian men build these elaborate fortresses of stoic masculinity, then act surprised when they find themselves desperately alone in their darkest moments, prepared to vilify the most convenient targets—Indian women. 

This is the conversation we should be having in the wake of Subhash’s death. How men are taught from childhood that their only acceptable emotional outlets are anger and aggression. How the same patriarchal structures that promise men power and privilege also sentence them to emotional illiteracy. The very systems that men’s rights activists defend so viciously are the ones suffocating men in the first place.

But that conversation would require real work and courage, wouldn’t it? It’s much easier to channel collective male pain into attacking women’s rights than to build genuine networks of support for men in crisis.

Real solidarity between men would look radically different from this. For decades, women’s movements have shown us what genuine support systems look like: creating networks of care, building safe spaces, and developing mechanisms to support each other. One of the first lessons of feminism is that the patriarchy also hurts men.

Imagine if men’s rights activism actually focused on men’s rights. What if, instead of flooding women’s mentions with rape threats, men created support groups where they could openly discuss their struggles with mental health? What if, instead of advocating for the return of Khap panchayats, they built support systems to help other men navigate emotional crises and legal battles with dignity? What if they understood that men’s “liberation” is inextricably linked with women’s equality, not opposed to it?

Maybe the next time around—and I truly hope there isn’t a next time—these martyrs for misogyny could try to think of Atul Subhash as a human being caught in the same patriarchal maze they’re so desperate to defend. And that beyond death, there is a tragedy in how Indian men live: disconnected, disengaged, and determined to blame everyone but the systems that are killing them.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)