cricket news: On India's Daughter

ADMIN · August 11, 2015

BBC Four features Storyville, a collection of international documentaries (i take these to mean stories from outside the UK). It is an inherently liberal idea. Britain's public broadcaster has a budget and space on its schedule for independently made documentaries which might broaden the horizons of the British public. In our globalized world, there are additional alliances such as the one the BBC has with NDTV for this film. This post is a review of the film, which I have now watched a couple of times on Youtube. It is also an account of some fierce reactions to the existence of the film from the Government and from the public. I hope, that in this, you will read about what the film is about and what it is trying to tell us, and not about what the film might have been had I made it.

The documentary, which has not been screened in India but has been available on Youtube despite successful copyright claims by the BBC, has generated rapid and varied reactions. Every bias and every interest is being served in these reactions, just as every instinct has being revealed. The BBC's move to make a copyright claim on this documentary is in itself interesting given that there are hundreds of BBC documentaries which have been available on Youtube for months, if not years (see this one, published in May 2014). The urgency of the current claim ought to be questioned.

The Government of India went to court and got a restraining order against the release of the film. The Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh made a statement to the Rajya Sabha (available here on the Press Information Bureau's site) which is a brilliant example of bureaucratese. It begins with a list conditions which were set before the filmmaker was granted permission to interview the convict Mukesh Singh. It goes on to say that these conditions were violated. It does not say which condition was violated, or how it was violated. The Minister simply wants us to take his word for it. Conditions were violated. This became evident in April 2014, after which the filmmakers were asked "to return the unedited footage within 15 days and also not to show the film as it violates the permission conditions". The filmmakers showed the film to the jail authorities who "noticed that the documentary film depicts the comments of the convict which are highly derogatory and are an affront to the dignity of women". The language of the Home Minister's statement goes "it was noticed" - it doesn't say who noticed it, what their competence was when it came to evaluating the such matters. Further, the jail authorities noticed that they were shown an "edited version" of the film. As opposed to an "unedited version"! I have yet to see an "unedited" film. So, of course, having completed this amazing detective work, the "jail authorities" (i'm assuming they did this, the statement uses the passive voice again), requested that the filmmakers "provide full copy of the unedited film shootout for further review by the authorities and that they were asked not to release/screen the documentary till it is approved by the authorities". I'm nonplussed by the idea of a "film shootout", but since this is an actual statement by the Home Minister of India to the Rajya Sabha, one ought to be respectful.

The Home Minister of India thus told the Rajya Sabha, that the Government went to Court to request a restraining order against a film because unspecified "jail authorities" decided that the things said in it by a prisoner convicted (pdf of the judgment by Yogesh Khanna, Additional Sessions Judge, Special Fast-Track Court, New Delhi, findings are on p. 235) of making a conspiracy, abduction for the purpose "illicit intercourse", attempt to murder, murder, "unnatural offences", dacoity, attempt to kill during a robbery, destruction of evidence and possession of stolen property, would offend women. Further, it reveals that the jail authorities basically expected to act as censors for the film, with the right to 'approve' it - something no self-respecting filmmaker is likely to accept. The statement also grants that the same jail authorities gave the filmmakers consent to interview the convict as long as the convict gave written consent. Given that the convict's lawyers have been all over the news media putting forth their views on the role of women in society, it would not be surprising if they advised their client to participate.

In the documentary itself, the convict's lawyers say things which are at least as offensive to women as the things said by the convict. But the jail authorities have no jurisdiction over what the lawyers say. The film would be just as offensive to women (granting for the moment, the jail authorities' argument) without statements of the convict.

Rajnath Mathur would be proud of the bureaucrats in the Home Ministry.

The discussion of freedom of speech is one which I am not fully equipped to get into. My best understanding of the matter is as follows. The right to free speech is not absolute under the Constitution of India. It is available subject to "reasonable restrictions" when it comes to "public order, decency or morality". Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows the Government to declare any document to be "forfeited to the government". This provision was used by the West Bengal Government in 2004 to ban Taslima Nasreen's novel Dwikhandita. It was not used in the case of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. In that case, the Government of India prohibited the import of the book from the UK. And since no publisher in India would publish the book, it became unavailable. Officially that is. Unofficially, it was available in sidewalk bookstalls in Indian cities throughout the 1990s and 2000s, reprinted illegally on cheap paper.

The fate of India's Daughter has been similar. The Government has restrained NDTV for airing the documentary by a court order, but youtube is likely to be more difficult to restrict. Unless Google complies with the Government of India, the ability of the public to upload it will always exceed the BBC's ability to make copyright claims and the film will probably be seen millions of times. As if that were not enough, the film is available as a torrent for download. I'm fairly sure that both the youtube uploads and the torrents are technically illegal, but the law is probably extremely difficult to enforce with any rigor in practice.

The Government's response to the documentary has been mediocre. I use the word advisedly. It has not made good, falsifiable arguments. Instead the Home Minister dutifully read out a vague statement prepared by a bureacrat - a statement which does little other than to reveal the hubris of jail authorities. It is a matter of some convenience that the Delhi Police report not to Arvind Kejriwal, but Rajnath Singh's Home Ministry. The mediocrity of the Government's response is further evident from the fact that it is not able enforce what it has clearly indicated is its will in this matter. It has managed to prevent NDTV from airing the film. The BBC is unlikely to listen to the Government of India and bin its documentary.

If you are a supporter of the RSS and the BJP Government, you should be disappointed because our Government has failed to make a persuasive argument against the release of the film. I am skeptical of the ability or desire of a Government full of men who are supporters (and in many cases, members) of an organization which explicitly requires one to be a "Hindu male" to be a member, to empower women and recognize them as equals. I hope I am proved wrong over the next 4 years, but somehow I doubt it.

The film has been reviewed in print from various viewpoints. The writer Salil Tripathi has argued that "If you are Indian, know India well, or are concerned about the routine and widespread violence against women, the film tells you nothing that you don’t already know" He proceeds to list a number of arguments which the film does not undertake - arguments which in his view might have produced a more rigorous picture of the gravity of the problem of sexual assault in India. These omissions seem to make the film less persuasive in Tripathi's eyes. In a far more strident critique Shivani Nag finds it difficult to even call the documentary a documentary. She calls it a "movie" and finds its emphasis on the victim's family galling. Both essays are worth reading in full.

Where both fall short is in failing to be fair to the film itself. While Nag and Tripathi start out discussing the film, they find themselves fervently litigating the argument against 'rape culture' (and other terminologies which have emerged in this discourse). India's Daughter is a documentary film and comes with all the inherent limits of the medium - time, money, access, and the voice of the filmmaker. It is not a film about rape culture. Nor is it essentially a commentary on gender relations in India. To the extent that it deals with these issues, it does so in the context of its central documentary focus. The film documents one episode in India and the reaction to it. On the long scholarly continuum which begins with Social History as under-theorized Anthropology and ends with Social Anthropology as over-theorized History, India's Daughter tentatively falls at the beginning. I say tentatively, because it is centrally concerned with a single case. In this sense, it is best viewed as a single case study. It is valuable work which adds consequentially to the literature.

The film is about India's Daughter - not an individual, but a relationship. It begins by recounting the specific details of the crime. We hear from the police, from the doctor who received Jyoti Singh in the hospital that evening, from her companion that evening, and from her remarkable parents. We hear from the defense lawyers and from one of the convicts. We hear from the convicts families. Most arrestingly, we heard from the despairing wife of one of the convicts. We hear from Retired Justice Leila Seth and former Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium, who were members along with Justice J.S. Verma of the three member Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law, and the results of their report (perhaps altogether too briefly). More valuably perhaps, we hear about how these individuals are thinking about the broader moral/legal problem in terms which are refreshingly free of legal jargon. These things may not be valuable to activists who are steeped in these matters and who must understandably tire of listening to elementary things, but they are valuable, I suggest, to the more general viewer who is perhaps less attuned to these arguments. We hear from the former Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit who makes the disarmingly simple point that small girls are often served less milk than small boys - a fact which must create the impression (for both girls and boys) that girls are less valuable than boys and thus do not deserve the same respect or consideration as individuals.

The most powerful aspect of the film is the way in which it portrays the convict Mukesh Singh. Ever since the matter exploded into the public sphere in December 2012, we have considered the perpetrators as otherworldly monsters - not quotidian men. But we hear, in earnest, emotionless terms the rationale (such as it is) from the convict himself. It is hard to say whether or not the convict feels remorse. He speaks about one of his other perpetrators doing "wrong things", and being in the habit of doing "wrong things". He often speaks in relativistic terms, saying "if we have done wrong, so have many others.". It is in many ways a desperate performance. His lawyers have positioned themselves as the keepers of the misogynistic world view (in their view, they are keepers of Indian culture itself, the "best culture" as they put it). There are dire predictions about consequences ("After this has happened, men will not let women go after they rape them." says Mukesh Singh at one point). The filmmaker bets on the the idea that viewers will have the basic intelligence to process these opinions without leaping to instant condemnation or cheers after every scene.

The film demystifies the crime. It juxtaposes the hopeful life of Jyoti Singh, which we have come to understand not as the life of an individual, but as the life of "India's daughter", with the hopeless poverty and rootlessness of perpetrators. The film does not preach, but this does not mean that it does not provoke thought. It may not spell out every argument about 'rape culture', but it does outline the everyday inequities which create the basis for 'rape culture' - the middle class inequities evident in the greater celebration of the birth of boys compared to that of birth of girls, as well as the larger economic inequities created by unemployment, and the inability of poor families (which tend to be large) to care for their children who, as a result, drift away at an age when they need supervision and care and schooling. There is much that is left unsaid in the film. But then, very little of what has happened in the matter since that December evening in 2012, has gone without comment in any case.

Like the crime, the documentary has revealed India to itself. A minister in the Union Cabinet has seen the film as an international conspiracy to defame India (Venkaiah Naidu, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs), the Home Minister reported to the Rajya Sabha that the Government went to court to get a restraining order against the film. The Prime Minister has been silent so far. Activists remain dissatisfied that the film doesn't go far enough. Others are offended that they have to listen to this convicted rapist and murderer, this person who they've concluded is a monster, who says some things which many of them believe or agree with or at least, have heard their friends, parents, elders and teachers say often. The suggestion that this terrible crime could arise out of these beliefs (which are often described as "traditional") must be troubling.

Supporters of the RSS and the BJP Government have gone to some lengths to justify the Government's decision to seek a restraining order against the film. Those who voted for the Prime Minister for his economic promises, but not for the RSS's view of the world in 2014, are by and large watching silently. There is little evidence so far that these people - the Confederation Indian Industry for example - have tried to lobby the Prime Minister against his Government's actions in this case. Perhaps he is losing some support. Others among these are probably mindful of their parochial interests. The absence of a serious Opposition party in the Lok Sabha has hurt the public discourse.

We tend to look for magic bullets when confronted with difficult things. Solutions which require us to take no responsibility. Fully objective views of reality. May be even fully objectively engineered reality itself. One in which we are not responsible at all for bad things which happen to others, especially bad things which systematically happen to certain specific types of others - women in this instance. India's Daughter is a singular contribution to the idea that we are all (all genders) inevitably complicit in gender discrimination unless we choose otherwise. To be a spectator is to reinforce the regressive status quo.

In our lifetime, perhaps we will see an India in which women are recognized as individuals, and not just as someone daughter or mother or wife or sister. Not primarily as the bearer of the honor of men with whom they bear these relations, but as individuals in their own right capable of courage and fear and laughter and despair and weakness and strength and integrity and corruption and reliability and capriciousness, of hurting others, and getting hurt. Currently, far too many of us are unwilling to recognize women this way. If India's Daughter changes one mind, it will have served its purpose. I hope it changes many more than just one.

Cruel hypocrisies abound in India's attitude to her female citizens. Leslee Udwin's film has revealed a lot of these with great compassion and skill. It has also revealed others quite unintentionally by the reaction its publicity snippets have elicited. For this we ought to be grateful. And we ought to watch the film. And think about it for a while. Like all great pedagogy, the success of India's Daughter will lie in its eventual obsolescence.