India's Daughter: Prepare to be disappointed

I watched India's Daughter on YouTube this morning, and was left with mixed feelings. None really positive, but mixed in their degree of being disturbing.

The film is supposed to be the story of Jyoti Singh. And I get the story in the first few minutes of the film, about her family's struggle from poverty, her struggle through her education and dealing with gender discrimination (something which goes on to haunt her, even after her death), and the admiration of her colleagues. However, the film doesn't focus just on Jyoti Singh, it delves a lot on what her life became after the gang rape of December 16, 2012. I'm not quite sure if this is “her story” - simply because this is the point at which she loses agency, and the violence committed against her – of the most heinous manner possible, mind you – continues till date. Her actions continue to be critiqued with callousness, her pseudonym – again given to her – used to justify selective amendments to criminal law, and is enthusiastically placed on measures to combat violence against women – funds, centres – only to have a most uncertain future. But this is Jyoti Singh's story – not Nirbhaya's – so one hopes that this time, it is the story that should be told.

Prepare to be disappointed, yet again.

Much has been said about the airtime given to Mukesh, the only convicted rapist who agrees to speak on camera, clarifying his role as only a driver, but justifying and specifying the acts of his co-accused. We get to see the other surviving accused of major age (accused Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide in judicial custody) scowl and pick fights with the police in the jail, possibly to observe their hot tempered nature. We see the “semi slums” (?) that they live in and naked children running about. We also get to see their families, wretched in their poverty, covered with flies and threatening suicide. Their hysteria is pitted against Jyoti's family, who are dignified in their sorrow and tears, perhaps unaware of the editor's cruelty that will eventually show Jyoti's mother with a tear trickling down her cheek at the very moment Mukesh's voice over recounts the juvenile accused assuring them that the victim's entrails had been flung from the vehicle.

Jyoti's parents speak in Hindi, and are aided by subtitles. The lawyers, who regularly argue in Delhi trial courts in Hindi, speak in English for this documentary, a language they appear to be uncomfortable in, which adds to their apparent caricaturisation. The lawyers say nothing different than what has been said by Members of Parliament, religious leaders and the like, in the past. For a non-Indian audience however, this will be repulsive. Is this India, where gang rapes take place to teach women their place, and stop the upward mobility of the educated lower middle class woman?

The problem with India's Daughter, besides resorting to awful orientalist tropes as detailed here, is that at some point it seeks to go beyond this story of December 16, and make this into a larger story, terming this a larger problem. As much as this makes for eyeballs, it does a disservice to the women's movement in India in general, and statistical reality. Had this been only about the case of December 16, besides aesthetics, I wouldn't really have much quarrel with this.

Several studies have pointed to the majority of cases of rape being perpetrated by persons known to the victim, and not of the nature of the December 16 incident. Despite this, measures to “combat rape” have been centred around the very image that India's Daughter harps on. The recent Human Rights Watch report on violence against women with disabilities in institutional care speaks of rampant sexual violence. These women are hardly India's daughters, far from any aspirations, they are not even accorded the right to vote. The criminalisation of marital rape, a strong recommendation of the Justice Verma Committee, has an uncertain future. The repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the Northeast and Kashmir, recommended on the grounds of the rampant sexual abuse of women at the hands of the army, is ignored. 

In light of the fact that the documentary seeks to be “much more” than the tragic story of Jyoti Singh, her rapists, and their families, the poor research behind this documentary is jarring. Prof. Maria Misra, who according to the Oxford University website, writes and researches on the history of India and the British Empire, is interviewed as some kind of expert on the cultural issues surrounding rape in India. It's an interesting choice by the filmmaker – Prof. Misra does not say anything of note beyond that which could be obtained from a simple Google search around the incident, and perhaps could have been better narrated by someone involved with the feminist movement and sexual offences in India – beginning with Mathura in 1983, which seems to be completely ignored. (Retd.) Justice Leila Seth is identified as “member, rape review committee” (in actuality it was the Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law chaired by (Retd.) Justice J.S. Verma), and even her comments are limited to “incidents like these”. The Committee itself is erroneously referred to as a group of “expert Senior Judges” by Dr. Mishra. The audience is told of the formation of this Committee, but little of what came of it. The only certainty is the regressive views of the apples in the rotten barrel, to paraphrase the filmmaker's own words.

I've highlighted procedural issues and concerns that I had with the case before, and more creep up upon viewing. The “jail psychiatrist for the rapists” give general statements on the motive behind the act – something which I am not sure he is authorised to do, in the interests of confidentiality between patient and doctor. Ethical issues also come in through the interviews of the head of the Juvenile Home which now houses the convicted “juvenile in conflict with law”, and the families themselves. In the end, I wasn't quite sure about what India's Daughter was trying to achieve, until I read that it is not merely a documentary - it is being considered as a basis for a global movement of “daughters of India”. This is why it needs to be called out – the assertion that nothing was happening until the December 16 protests (and ignoring the fact that a Criminal Amendment Bill to expand definitions of rape had been lobbied for by the feminist movement, which was pending before Parliament at the time of the incident) is fallacious, and I'd have liked a movement which concerns me, as a “daughter of India”, to be more aware of what reality actually looks like.

As a free speech activist, I find a blanket ban on the documentary absurd. My apprehensions as regards the impact on the appellate/miscellaneous processes still stand, and are in fact compounded by the vague and rather disturbing “consent form” allegedly signed by the accused. They would have been allayed with a delay in the broadcast of this documentary, which I feel is the ethical obligation of the filmmaker to have undertaken. Be that as it may, to the daughters of India, the filmmaker and the proposed movement have a lot to get right, and one hopes that the well thought out criticism of the film is heard above the absurd reasoning behind banning the film to protect India's reputation.