Over the past two weeks, the Indian government has been fighting with the BBC over a documentary titled India’s Daughter, in a tussle that keeps revealing new facets with every passing day. At the time of writing, there is debate about, among other things, the documentary’s portrayal of the country, the Indian government’s ban on its broadcast, and the suspicious production of India’s Daughter itself. On Wednesday, a panel of judges at the Delhi High Court upheld the ban on the Indian broadcast of the documentary till April 15. On that day, they’ll hear the case again, along with looking at the advisory originally issued by the government for the ban. The noncommittal nature of the verdict means this saga is far from over.
India’s Daughter: The Story of Jyoti Singh
Two years ago, in New Delhi, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was on her way home after watching a movie. She was traveling in a bus with a male companion when she was brutally attacked and raped by six men. An iron rod was inserted into her and her entrails excavated. After the six men had their way with her, she was thrown out of the bus, as was her friend, who had also been assaulted. Jyoti succumbed to her injuries two weeks later.
As news of the gang rape broke out, the Indian public reacted in fury. Mass protests took place in multiple corners of the country, with Delhi, the site of the crime, being host to the most popular ones. The government’s response to these displays of public outrage was widely criticized, as peaceful protesters were shot with water cannons and tear-gas shells, and arrested.
The incident led to a massive overhaul of India’s laws concerning rape, while simultaneously the trial of the six alleged rapists got underway. One of the accused was a juvenile at the time of the crime and was tried by the Juvenile Justice Board. He received a sentence of three years in a reform facility, the maximum allowed under Indian law. One of the accused adults committed suicide in his jail cell. The remaining four were tried in a fast-track court and found guilty of rape, murder, unnatural offenses, and destruction of evidence. They received the death sentence, but have appealed against the verdict. India’s Supreme Court, the final arbiter in this case, has yet to announce its decision.
India’s Daughter purports to recount the details of this incident, along with helping us understand Jyoti’s background and the systemic misogyny in Indian society. Directed by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin, and part of BBC’s Storyville series, the documentary features interviews with Jyoti’s parents (who describe her upbringing and their grief over losing their daughter), Mukesh Singh (one of the convicted rapists), two lawyers for the defense, and various others.
As someone who was born and brought up in India, sadly, I was surprised by little in Udwin’s documentary. Jyoti’s story is emblematic of the aspirations of the country’s youth, and what happened to her a reminder of how unsafe India is for women. The chilling lack of remorse displayed by Mukesh is rivaled only by the brash misogyny in the statements made by the two defense lawyers, who are troublingly part of the country’s judiciary system. They offer elaborate and senseless analogies self-righteously comparing women to flowers that should be “protected,” gems that should not be left out for dogs, and food (note that all of those comparisons are objects). The scenes of the fiery protests in Delhi and their totalitarian police shutdown serve as a depressing trip down memory lane for everyone who followed the incident, in person or over the news.
Alas, the documentary isn’t entirely free from suspicion. India’s Daughter is unabashedly sensationalist and the filmmaking in many sections is lousy. Tacky “reconstructions” of the crime, one of them from Jyoti’s point of view while lying on the floor of the bus, achieve little except leaving bile in the viewer’s mouth. As a piece of investigative journalism, it’s far from comprehensive: The opinions of key figures in the story, such as Jyoti’s friend who was also attacked that day, are not mentioned even through text or archival footage. As a documentary dealing with a topic as grave as rape, it indulges in cinematic sleights of hand that are ethically problematic. At various points, it adopts the format of a news broadcast—with a headline-screaming ticker and an unseen anchor—without acknowledging that this isn’t a real news broadcast but another scripted segment, the “anchor” actually an actor reading lines. India’s Daughter is irresponsible in many ways—but despite its artistic and moral shortcomings, it’s important viewing nontheless. For people who didn’t know the nuances of this case—a watershed moment for Indian society in the last decade—the documentary could offer a helpful primer. And for those who know the details all too well, seeing them brought up again should serve as a reminder of how little progress society has ultimately made over the years.
The Indian Government: Red-Faced
The trouble began on March 1, when excerpts from the interview with Mukesh were aired as part of the publicity campaign for the film. “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night,” Mukesh says to the camera, straight-faced, from jail. “Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”
The video was picked up by news channels and telecast nationwide. The Indian government reacted swiftly, obtaining a court order by March 4 banning the documentary’s broadcast in India. On the same day, in Parliament, Home Minister Rajnath Singh claimed that the government “will not allow any attempt by any individual, group or organization to leverage such unfortunate incidents for commercial benefit.”
Meenakshi Lekhi, the national spokesperson for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, justified the government’s actions by saying that India’s Daughter would adversely affect tourism in India. Another cabinet minister, Venkaiah Naidu, called the documentary “an international conspiracy to defame India” and stated further courses of action would be looked into.
The BBC retaliated by moving up the documentary’s U.K. premiere—initially scheduled for International Women’s Day on March 8—to that very day. The broadcast drew 300,000 viewers, a record for the Storyville series. The BBC also uploaded the film on YouTube, where it went viral. The Indian government responded with increasing surgical precision. On March 5, it asked YouTube to take the video down; the company complied the same day. It also sent a notice to BBC4, the channel responsible for the U.K. telecast. The British broadcaster, however, said India would find it difficult to enforce a ban because of the different jurisdictions at play.
Leslee Udwin, who was in India till then, flew out of the country to avoid legal action and arrest. A day earlier, she had appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reverse the ban. “India should be embracing this film—not blocking it with a knee-jerk hysteria without even seeing it,” she said in her appeal, asking Modi to tackle the film’s “unceremonious silencing.”
NDTV, an Indian news channel, was supposed to air India’s Daughter in conjunction with the BBC and several other networks on Sunday. But, during the slot originally meant for the broadcast, powerless against the government’s diktat, it screened an image of a flickering oil lamp along with a ticker of public statements supporting the film and condemning its ban.
The Bar Council of India, meanwhile, sent show-cause notices to the aforementioned defense lawyers for their derogatory statements. It’s possible their licenses will be revoked. An activist who defied the ban and screened India’s Daughter in a village near the city of Agra was arrested.
The Documentary’s Production: Two-Faced?
The above section may make the Indian government resemble a one-note villain, the Goliath dominating Udwin’s David. Yet a closer investigation into the government’s objections reveals that there is something remiss with Udwin’s conduct as well.
Indian laws state that a foreign filmmaker is not allowed inside an Indian prison. In the past, artists have circumvented this rule by partnering with Indian production companies, which makes the paperwork easier. Udwin, apparently, did the same, but then went a step further. In Parliament, Rajnath Singh announced that a No Objection Certificate (NOC) for filming inside the prison had been given to Udwin and an Indian filmmaker named Anjali Bhushan. Worldview, a British organization that financed India’s Daughter, also listed Bhushan as a co-producer. However, in the finished documentary, Bhushan’s name is nowhere to be seen in the credits. Even the pages of two distributors for India’s Daughter don’t mention her. Critics have been up in arms asking who this mystery woman is and how she has vanished.
The film’s credits mention it’s a joint venture between Assassin Films and Tathagat Films. While Assassin is known to be Udwin’s production company, the latter has been puzzling investigators. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has no record of a company called “Tathagat Films,” and it’s not mentioned in the original papers the filmmakers submitted for gaining permission. A company called “Apricot Sky Entertainment,” owned by Bhushan, is listed in these papers but, again, invisible in the actual film.
Indian filmmaker Nishtha Jain, in a Facebook post, came out to say that Udwin had actually imposed a gag order upon her Indian co-producer—an allegation repeated elsewhere—which was preventing the truth of the collaboration from coming out. If true, then this casts an aura of hypocrisy around Udwin’s plaintive cries about freedom of speech and expression. Even the friend who was with Jyoti on that unfortunate day, and who is strangely absent from India’s Daughter, has called the film “far from truth.” When asked about the documentary, he told CNN-IBN that the “facts are hidden and the content is fake.”
A report in Navbharat Times, a Hindi daily, claimed that Udwin had assured Mukesh, the convicted rapist, that she would pay 40,000 rupees ($650) to his family if he spoke to her team. M.L. Sharma, one of the two defense lawyers interviewed in the documentary, also argued that foul play was involved in gaining Mukesh’s consent. He pointed out that the civilian clothes Mukesh is wearing in some sections indicate he was interviewed before the court had announced its verdict, because as a convict, he would mandatorily be dressed in the prison uniform. Following this timeline, one must question how the documentary includes interviews with Mukesh shot before he had even signed a consent letter—which was nearly a month after his conviction. In fact, the consent letter itself is raising eyebrows: It’s in English, a language Mukesh cannot speak, read or write.
What Now?
This has been a bewildering journey through a labyrinth, and the worst is that there’s more to come. The lack of closure in the Delhi High Court’s decision means that both camps, pro- and anti-ban, will keep waging a war of words in the public domain. That this will make the ban even more meaningless is an irony apparently lost on everyone in power. The number of people who have watched India’s Daughter only because it was banned and had “angered” the Indian government is staggering.
Udwin’s actions are contentious, and the documentary she has made is sensationalistic, lopsided, and rabble-rousing. Nevertheless, it deserves an audience and the Indian government was, in part, misguided or plain myopic in banning it. The callous and self-serving explanations offered by numerous government and party leaders only make things worse.
However, not all of the government’s concerns are frivolous. Some points they want clarification from Udwin are undeniably legitimate, and it would be for the good for everyone if Udwin and her partners would engage in a dialogue with the government over the troublesome dealings that went into the production of India’s Daughter.
