As a proud Indian, I get very angry when our leaders shame us in the eyes of the world. They did this spectacularly last week when senior ministers of the government declared that a documentary film was made to “defame” India. The Home Minister declared war upon this documentary and said it would be banned not just in India but in the world. And he has done his best to achieve this. His colleague, the venerable Venkaiah Naidu, told the Lok Sabha that the film was part of an insidious conspiracy against our ancient land. Assuming that they had the approval of the Prime Minister to make such idiotic statements, would he like to explain why this hysteria was allowed?
Has he seen the film? I am willing to bet that he has not, or he may have been very moved by the story of Jyoti Singh brought beautifully alive in India’s Daughter through the words of her parents. I am not going to call her Nirbhaya because her parents want her name to be known. Jyoti’s story is the story of an intelligent, ambitious, modern young woman who dedicated her tragically short life to trying to lift her parents out of the poverty in which she lived. She thought she could do this by becoming a doctor. And they sold land and broke the rules of tradition to do for a daughter what is only done for sons.
The documentary works on two levels and if it is the story of Jyoti, it is also the story of young men brought up with an older, corrupt idea of India in which women were divided into two categories: good and bad. Jyoti fell into the bad category because she went to see a movie in a mall with a man who was not her husband, brother or father. These are the rules of what the RSS chief called Bharat when he said rapes only occurred in India.
The irony is that both Jyoti and her rapists came from Bharat. But, as a modern woman, she believed that coming to India gave her the same rights as her brothers. For this she was brutally killed. Young Indians found her story so much their own story that they protested for days outside Parliament and the mighty edifices that constitute the seat of government on Raisina Hill.
They lit candles, sang protest songs and demanded justice and it was this that so moved a foreign filmmaker, herself a rape victim, that she gave two years of her own life to telling Jyoti’s story. It could not have been told without telling the story of the rapists because, if Jyoti’s story represents light, the story of the men who raped and killed her with such casual brutality is the story of India’s dark side. In that darkness, not just grown women but little girls are raped. Every day. And, when they try to get justice, the policemen they go to often exhibit the same dark mindset of their rapists. A 10-year-old rape victim was locked up in a police station near Bulandshahr because her parents tried to report her rapists.
India’s Daughter holds up a mirror to Indian society and it does this with compassion and sensitivity. It does not begin to tell the story of how horribly Indian girls are treated even before they dare to emerge from their mothers’ wombs. There are no surveys but I am willing to bet that more baby girls are killed by ‘foeticide’ in India than in any other country. It is an old, old Indian tradition and used to be called infanticide.
The Prime Minister has spoken against this ugly tradition more than once. When he went to the village he has adopted as his model village, Jayapur near Varanasi, he urged its residents to celebrate the birth of a baby girl and told them that the cycle of life (“sansar ka chakra”) would stop moving if girls were killed before they were born.
It is practices like these that defame India. It is when it takes three years for justice to be done in a case like that of Jyoti Singh that India is defamed. It is when little girls are raped and do not manage to get justice till they are adults that India is defamed. And, above all India is defamed when her leaders behave like our ministers and MPs behaved last week. Right, Prime Minister?
