Why India should be seeing her daughter
Should Leslee Udwin’s BBC documentary India’s Daughter, which interviewed an unrepentant Mukesh Singh, one of those sentenced to death for the rape and murder of Nirbhaya, be allowed to be aired?
Wednesday’s Rajya Sabha debate said a resounding No. Home Minister Rajnath Singh ordered an inquiry into how Ms Udwin gained permission — apparently granted by the earlier Congress-led government — to gain access to Tihar Jail where the convict is housed. The debate generated more heat than light.
From Tuesday morning, when the news that the documentary was going to be telecast broke, several TV channels have been taking the moral high ground, stamping what would be normally considered an excellent piece of journalism as “voyeurism”. Never mind that on a rough count nearly 75 per cent of ads and movies that India makes are nothing if not voyeuristic. Never mind too that when the appallingly brutal act was committed on December 16, 2012, every news outlet was competing with each other to get the details, the minutae adding to the fascination of the horror and translating into viewership and readership. Certainly, we will not talk about the envy Indian channels must have felt at being scooped by the BBC.
Besides the fact that no act of total censorship is really effective in this technological age, the moral majority establishment has bought the argument that the criminal’s interview is indecent and insensitive. This is a typical Indian dope trick. You continue to pay token respect to what on the surface seems the right thing to do by women, and deep down nothing much will change of the lumpen reality which sees woman mostly as an object. By the same measure, the interview with the Nazi criminals who perpetrated the horrors of the Holocaust should not be on air, or find their way into the social media. Mass killers like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot should not be studied because society’s genteel conscience would be hurt. When, in fact, it makes much sense to bring it all out in the open so we know what exactly constituted the mindsets that require us to shut our eyes to truth behind the veil of the seemingly delicate sensibility.
The interview, as far as one can gather, is about the rapist making self-incriminating confessions. It is also about his idea of women. He says for example that had Nirbhaya not fought back, he wouldn’t have retaliated with such feral violence. He still sees women as a source of provocation and rape as a response. He believes good women don’t stay out of home at night. These are all traditional ideas and values, to a large extent shared by the Indian middleclass some of whom actually find their way to Rajya Sabha and the media. Yet it is the same class of people doing their best to ban the interview which critiques these values. Somewhere then, the rapist, whose working of the mind this documentary would have further exposed, is finding unexpected — and perhaps unwitting — alliance in politics and media.
What, in fact, we need is precisely an opening of the Indian mind, an ability to grapple with reality in all its complexity. This documentary would have contributed to it, because it intends to be a study of a certain kind of rape psychosis. We need more such profiles so we know what we are dealing with; so we can prevent a certain moral order finding its articulation in violence and rape.