Avadhesh Yadav hanged himself to death in his house last February. In a note, the 25-year-old manager at Yes Bank, Jhansi, said he'd decided to kill himself because he couldn't bear to see his partially-paralysed father and brother being called rapists and sent to jail. Yadav blamed himself for the mess because the allegations were made by his wife. "Avadhesh's marriage didn't work from word go. After two years of ups and downs, he asked for a separation," his brother Vikas Yadav, says. Last year, she filed a complaint of rape and domestic violence against her husband's family - alleging she was dragged into a car and sexually assaulted.

"We had never seen a police station from inside. Suddenly we were doing daily rounds of the courts, women's groups and police stations. My brother went into depression," Vikas Yadav says. He has started a Facebook page - Justice for Avadhesh - and plans to fight the five pending court cases against the family till they come out clean.

Yadav may seem a one-off case in a country where, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 93 women were raped every day in 2013. Indeed, crimes against women are on the rise - with more and more such cases coming to the fore.

But a loud new voice - of men's groups - is increasingly being heard on the table debating sexual assault in India. "Our outreach programmes show that a huge number of rape cases turn out to be false," says Amit Deshpande, founder of Vaastav, a Mumbai-based umbrella body of 40 men's rights organisations.

Vaastav runs a national helpline, SIF-ONE, which received 38,000 distress calls last year from men in marital disputes. "Of these, 1,000 men reported being framed in false rape cases," Deshpande claims.

Women activists, however, seek to point out that women seldom charge men with "false cases" of rape, for they are the ones who have to battle the stigma of sexual assault. To top it, as NCRB data show, 94 per cent of women are raped by acquaintances, points out Madhu Mehra, executive director, Partners for Law in Development, Delhi.

"So it takes time and courage for women to report rape, and often the evidence produced is not what the court wants," she asserts, adding that if a rape can't be proved it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

It was to tackle the issue of rape against women that laws dealing with sexual offences were strengthened, after a nationwide outcry against the rape and subsequent death of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012. The uproar also led to a rise in voices being raised against sexual assault on women, and more cases being reported.

"Everyone is telling women about their legal rights today," says Delhi-based activist and filmmaker Deepika Narayan Bharadwaj. "It's blaring out of television, radio, the Internet, advertisements, chat shows, everywhere. This has led to more use and misuse of the law."

The law, senior Supreme Court advocate Wills Mathew points out, was strengthened to provide speedy justice and greater security to women. But he warns that it has also turned into a tool to fight disputes - property wrangles, professional rivalry, relationships gone wrong and so on. "I'm currently fighting 10 such cases," he says.

Bharadwaj is giving final touches to a documentary film she's made on men who committed suicide following marital discord. While researching for the movie, she met Vipul Gupta, a 28-year-old Delhi entrepreneur who runs a printing and publishing firm. Last week, Gupta won a rape case filed against him by his wife.

Gupta met his wife through a matrimonial website and married in January last year. It didn't take long for the marriage to turn sour. In June, his wife filed a police complaint alleging she was drugged and gang raped by her father-in-law and husband. "Overnight, we were branded criminals," Gupta recalls.

An enquiry conducted by the assistant commissioner of police at Delhi's Vikas Puri police station found - with the help of mobile phone records - that Gupta's wife was in Karnal, not Delhi, on the day she claimed to have been assaulted. Gupta now plans to sue his wife for criminal defamation.

Men who claim that they have been victimised by women often seek help from organisations such as the Delhi-based Save Family Foundation (SFF). "A few years ago, a majority of cases we received revolved around dowry harassment and marital discord. Now rape has emerged as the top crime," founder member Amit Lakhani stresses.

Among the measures that these men's groups have been campaigning against is the Indian Penal Code's domestic violence act - Section 498A, which stipulates the arrest of family members of the complainant.

The men's groups had a hurrah moment last year, when the Supreme Court noted its misuse. In the judgment passed in the Arnesh Kumar versus State of Bihar case, Justice Chandramauli Prasad wrote, "Section 498A has lent itself to a dubious pride of place amongst provisions that are used as weapons rather than shields by disgruntled wives. The simplest way to harass is to get the husband and his relatives arrested under this provision."

The judgment went on to instruct police officers not to automatically arrest someone under a 498A case, but to, "satisfy themselves about the necessity for arrest".

Virag Dhulia felt vindicated that day. "We've been shouting from the rooftops that marital laws need to be gender neutral. Husbands can also face violence in marriage," says the co-founder of Confidare Consultancy, a Bangalore-based men's rights group.

Mehra of Partners for Law in Development, however, doesn't subscribe to simplistic true-or-false conclusions in complex matters like sexual assault and marital violence.

"498A is crucial as it is the only law for women in a society where dowry deaths and marital violence are so common," she says. Mehra believes that it's not the laws that need to be changed but the law enforcement. "You can file a false case under any law. Why single out 498A?"

Flavia Agnes, founder of the Mumbai-based Majlis Legal Centre, agrees. "There are many laws that are being misused. And there are also remedies within the law for such misuse," she points out.

Three years ago, Samarth Sharma would've stood with a placard behind Mehra or Agnes. "I grew up with three sisters and was a big believer in women's rights," says the technology graduate of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, who is currently working as project manager at a Gurgaon-based information technology firm.

Marriage changed him. The IT professional shot into the limelight last December, when he posted a message on his Twitter account - threatening to commit suicide in front of the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) office because of alleged harassment from women's NGOs.

"My wife wanted my mother to leave our house. When I refused, she filed cases of domestic violence, attempt to murder, unnatural sex and dowry harassment against me," Sharma says.

Sharma now knows as much about the IPC as computer coding. He's one of Confidare Consulting's 600 members, providing legal assistance to men fighting marital battles, across Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Calcutta.

Clearly, the men's rights movement is gathering momentum in India. Mumbai's Vaastav Foundation says it actively uses the social media and a YouTube channel to spread the word on men's rights. The SFF has conducted special training sessions on subjects ranging from, "How to use RTI" to "Surviving false cases" and set up a national helpline with 100 counsellors and regional WhatsApp chat groups for men. "Our Yahoo group has 8,000 members," Lakhani adds.

In March 2013, Mathew filed a petition in the Supreme Court on behalf of Niranjan Kumar Mandal, asking the court to find a way to restore his lost dignity. A Delhi-based diagnostic centre owner, Mandal spent four years in jail on rape charges, before being acquitted in 2010. "After acquittal, he felt he'd been pushed into a bigger jail. His family continued to be ostracised," Mathew rues.

Mandal's plea, however, was dismissed by the judge, who held that similar cases would flood the courts.

Lakhani believes it's time men got their due. "A false sexual assault accusation can dent anyone's dignity. Such men lose faith fast and commit suicide," he says.

But Mehra is convinced that the rising chorus of voices against India's domestic violence laws is just a backlash against women asserting their rights.

"This is not about some women misusing gender laws. Anyone with power and money can make the system work for them," she says. "What is needed is for the police to verify facts. We need accountable enforcement."