What Indians Won’t See

What Indians Won’t See

I just watched “India’s Daughter,” Leslee Udwin’s documentary about the case of Jyoti Singh, the woman who was gang-raped and fatally injured in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012. It features interviews with, among others, one of the men convicted of killing her, who is now on death row; his lawyers; and relatives of both the victim and the rapists.

The documentary has roused much passion and debate in India, and so of course the Indian government has banned it. And at first some of India’s most respected feminists agreed with that decision.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting argues the film will incite violence against women. The minister of parliamentary affairs claims it is “an international conspiracy to defame India.” Indira Jaising, a feminist lawyer, attacks it for “creating public space” for the convicts, and fears they may be seen as role models.

I don’t like the title of the movie. I don’t like many of the people in it. And I don’t agree with much of what they say. But I think banning it is a very bad idea.

The film shows Mukesh Singh, the convicted criminal, saying he believes that only about 20 percent of girls are “good,” that they are asking for trouble when they go out at night with boys, and that if they don’t want to be killed when they get raped, they should just lie back silently and submit. He also says that he and the other men who assaulted Jyoti Singh were teaching her a lesson, and calls her death an “accident.”

I was riveted to the screen, not because I was shocked but because I had heard these things before, in 1980 in Bombay, from the four men who pinned me down and took turns raping me. It was almost a relief to see and hear it all again onscreen: I hadn’t been remembering that night wrong; my assailants had told me it was my fault they were hurting me; they really had said they were doing me a favor.

And this is just the reason both that the government has banned “India’s Daughter” and that the film shouldn’t be banned. Mukesh Singh’s words are familiar. His views aren’t particularly radical. The rapist isn’t some bogeyman lurking out there; the rapist represents a side of us. It’s the side of India that celebrates the birth of boys with more expensive sweets than the birth of girls, and that thinks girls will be girls and boys will be boys.

Most of the media’s attention has focused on its portrayal of the convict’s opinions, but his lawyers go one better. M.L. Sharma says women are like “flowers” and men like “thorns,” and warns that, “If you put that flower in a gutter, it is spoilt. If you put that flower in a temple, it will be worshiped.” Later, calling women diamonds and men dogs, he says: “If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out. You can’t stop it.”

But I am not a diamond, and all the dogs I know have four legs.

A.P. Singh, a lawyer for another defendant, gave a television interview during the trial in which he said that if “my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself,” he would douse her with petrol and burn her alive in front of his whole family.

This is not a man now in prison for rape and murder; this is a representative of the law, who appears in court resplendent in a black and white outfit.

After the December 2012 attack on Jyoti Singh, rape became a topic of daily conversation in India. This spoke well of us Indians — it was a conversation we needed to have, because we have some pretty outrageous views on women, men and gender roles. “India’s Daughter” is forcing that conversation again, and that can only be positive.

It’s important to hear that policeman say of the victim, “She looked like a cow looks after giving birth to a calf.” (Given the Hindu proscription on the consumption of beef as meat, Jyoti Singh would probably have been safer had she in fact been a cow.) It’s important to see the look on the lawyer’s face when he flatly states that friendship between men and women has no place in Indian society.

Listening to Mukesh Singh, I wasn’t surprised. Listening to the defense lawyers, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or vomit. Listening to the judges on the Verma Committee, a special government commission set up after Ms. Singh’s death to enhance punishments for sexual crimes, I felt pride.

Listening to the victim’s relatives, I tried to imagine their anguish and couldn’t. Listening to the rapists’ relatives, I tried to imagine their anguish and couldn’t. But I could, and I did, listen to all of them. And everyone should be able to.

Sohaila Abdulali is a columnist for the Indian newspaper Mint.

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