On the loose: Politics of Decency

Representational image

The Women and Child Ministry has put forward amendments to widen the scope of the Indecent Representation Of Women (Prohibition) Act, keeping in mind technological advancements and digital messaging platforms like What’s App and Skype. Nude pictures and lewd videos have been the undoing of cricketers like Mohammed Shami and actors like Rhea Sen. The original law enacted in 1986 related primarily to depictions of women in print media, advertisements and writing. It is being changed based on recommendations from the National Commission for Women. According to reports in all the newspapers, in the future, digital forwards or electronic material that depict women in a derogatory way or as sexual objects, may be punishable with a fine of Rs two lakh and a prison term of upto three years.

Who can forget the decade-old DPS MMS scandal, a two-minute, lurid, video clip of teenagers that was copied and shared with impunity. Unfortunately, it provoked outrage only because nobody could ignore the truth, that young people don’t just innocently hold hands. There was a surge of righteous indignation, evident in Bollywood’s treatment of the consequences to women caught in compromising positions on camera. In Dev D, based partly on the DPS MMS incident, the victim takes to prostitution. The fact that it was a shocking violation of consent and ultimately devastating for the woman in the video, was completely disregarded. Now, incidents like these are a regular feature in the news. There are stories of women submitting to blackmail, even contemplating suicide because some man they were involved with threatened to post naked images of them online. It is crucial to have a law to address this because images go viral, blowing up someone’s life in mere seconds. It’s impossible to quell the spread, or get them off the internet. It is deeply unfair that even if somebody chooses to trust another with an intimate image, there are no consequences to them spreading it without permission.

Every country is grappling with cases of revenge porn and it’s very rare that litigation yields either closure or a big payout. The only way to solve the very serious problems that can arise with sexting is to remember that relationships change. And if naive people would stop clicking explicit pictures there wouldn’t be a problem to begin with. Defining indecency, however, remains problematic. In the amendment to the bill tabled in the Rajya Sabha in 2012, one of the points explaining ‘indecent representation’ refers to any material depicting women as lascivious or appealing to prurient interests. Another point mentions indecency as showing a woman, her form or body in a way which is likely to deprave, corrupt or injure public morality. These are very ambiguous points that reek of judgment. Personally, I found Veere Di Wedding cringeworthy and banal, because they tried to sell the idea of modernity by depicting women drinking, smoking and swearing liberally. But plenty of 20-somethings have loved it. People’s ideas on what is unacceptable are wildly divergent, determined by so many variables like our level of education, age, choice of career, even country of origin among so many other factors.

There was a time when Madhuri Dixit’s song Choli ke peechhe kya hai was considered needlessly provocative and Mallika Sherawat’s dozen kisses in a movie were thought to be obscene. Nobody would bat an eyelid today, both seem quaintly acceptable. By these new proposed yardsticks, if an ad filmmaker wants to show a scantily clad woman in an ad for washing powder, he could be censored. Filming women, or men, without their permission, and forwarding those messages, is cruel and must be treated as a punishable offence. But it would be better for the law to steer clear of the highly subjective issue of obscenity.