Events of the last three months – most recently the ban of BBC 4 documentary “India’s Daughter” – reveal the shortcomings of a government that seems to believe India needs to be kept a secret from itself.
BBC 4 / Via buzzfeed.com
It took one mid-morning viewing of the 59-minute, incomparably hyped documentary to surmise that BBC's "India's Daughter" was not made for an Indian audience. (That is, if you weren't already tipped off by its slated simultaneous 7-country release and the global campaign scheduled for right after.) It recaps information we've had engraved in our collective memory for two years; it dramatically reconstructs images that were seared in our brains indelibly; it hammers home a simplified narrative – rapists are monsters, India is angry – that conversations in India have evolved far past.
Before its release, "India's' Daughter" by Leslee Udwin raised a lot of Indians' hopes, myself included. In its press and publicity, it appeared to be the analytical, thought-provoking, comprehensive look at the culture of misogyny that allowed Dec. 16th 2012 to happen. In reality, it only just scratched the surface.
The story it tells is still harrowing, no matter how well you know it, and only a psychopath would be emotionally unmoved by the image of a father crying while he describes having to burn his daughter's body. But, while it is heartbreaking and emotionally captivating in parts, stripped of the hype surrounding it, "India's Daughter" contains little new information for the average news-reading Indian.
And yet, it has been the topmost trending topic on Twitter in India for two days. It commanded the coveted attention of India's primetime news anchors and their millions of viewers. It has inspired hundreds of articles already and hundreds of thousands of page-views. And all in thanks to one entity that, ironically, set out to mute this conversation and ended up amplifying it: The government of India.
BBC 4
On Mar. 3, after an excerpt from Udwin's forthcoming documentary went viral (in it, the accused, convicted, death-row prisoner rapist says women are at fault for rape), the government's Ministry of Information & Broadcasting banned its release in India.
(As soon as the controversy surrounding her documentary began, Leslee Udwin fled India in a hurry, fearing for her safety and freedom.)
Even before anyone had viewed the documentary in full (and that fact is important to note), a lot of people found it to be problematic, and for various reasons. The title, for instance, drew the ire of feminists across the subcontinent. To organize a global movement around a "daughter" is to perpetuate the extraordinarily harmful and pervasive notion that women are defined by their relation to their families, and specifically with their relation to men. Others felt that the whole exercise reeked of western, white voyeurism more than it did conscientious awareness-raising. Several people found it problematic to permanently pin the identity of "rapist" onto Mukesh Singh, a stranger to the victim in a brutal, one-time crime. (The argument was that such incidents, while unforgivable, constitute a minuscule fraction of India's rapes, and to make this man the face of rape culture potentially makes it easier for all the uncles, fathers, husbands, friends, boyfriends, and neighbours, who constitute the bulk of this country's sexual assaulters, to remain in the shadows.) Still others were glad for the ban because court cases surrounding the crime are still underway and to release an interview with the accused and his lawyers is to derail the process of justice.
These reasons, each a valid critique, are unfortunately not the ones that the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting used to justify their ban. While their statement nods towards the legal ramifications of airing such a documentary, it first reasons that airing footage of the accused rapist being interviewed could "encourage and incite violence against women, thus compromising women's public safety" and "provide encouragement to antisocial elements to indulge in violent acts compromising law and order."
I'm sorry. Hold up.
That encouragement was provided a long, long time ago when Bollywood made street harassment and sexual coercion synonymous with romance. It is provided doubly every few weeks when some or another politician gracelessly rams a foot into their own mouth, blaming everything under the sun for rape – cellphones, mannequins, chow mein, the victim – except the patriarchy and rape culture that have been institutionalized variously in our laws and their enforcement.
So what's really going on here?
