Perception And Propriety: The Problem With 'India's Daughter'

The problems with BBC’s documentary ‘India’s Daughter’ are many, and very serious

I remember the debate we had on the internet about the dress. The dress was only of one colour pattern. But someone took a photograph of it. All of a sudden we could see two patterns and we spent our day fighting about who was right. Perception is an important thing. This we have long established as being self-evident. 

The documentary ‘India’s Daughter’, directed by Leslee Udwin, has shown us the problems that “perception” can create. At the outset it is essential that we note that one can be wholly against what happened in Delhi, maybe even hope that the criminals are eventually hanged, and at the same time have a problem with a documentary like ‘India’s Daughter’. The two are not mutually exclusive. 

In this piece, I will deal with the problem in a two-fold manner. At the outset, I will address the problems with the documentary from a purely factual point of view and in the second part I will discuss the issues of legality and more importantly, propriety. 

A) The issue of the facts

The documentary doesn’t once let us know the questions that the alleged rapists and their advocates are being asked. All we have are broken statements from what is admittedly a six-hour interview. Further, the fact that there is no flow between the statements does make one question if they were put there only for their controversial value. 

The alleged aim of this documentary is to examine the attitudes that led to the incident in Delhi during the December of 2012. However, not once are we told if the views expressed by those being interviewed are actually the views held by the average Joe. I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here and say that, perhaps,  these do reflect the attitudes of the average Joe. Even if they do, is there any merit that can be gained from putting limited excerpts of an interview out there? If you want the nation to know how the alleged rapists think, then show us the full interview, including the questions that were put to them.

For example, if someone were to ask me the question, “what were politicians and leader’s saying as a reaction to what happened?”, then I would probably give the same answer Mukesh Singh gave. That’s why context is important. 

Context further becomes important to judge the motivations behind something like this. Without context, the entire interview with the prisoners and their advocates seems like nothing but voyuerism and an attempt to market a film by playing on genuine outrage that this country felt about the December incident. 

Now to the more problematic of the issues. Mukesh Singh is currently on Death Row. The entire nation has expressed that eventually it would enjoy seeing him hanged. There is evidence to show that those under death row exist in a world of delusion, perhaps as a way of coping with their fate. Most try to find a way to justify their innocence to themselves. We don’t know if these are the views of Mukesh Singh, the man who allegedly committed the incident of December 2012 or Mukesh Singh the condemned prisoner awaiting the hangman. The veracity of these statements needs to be brought into question. 

Lastly, if we are to assume that Mukesh Singh was indeed speaking the truth, then it becomes quite clear that we can’t hang him. Through the interview he sticks to the facts and says he was ALWAYS at the wheel of the bus. This means that he didn’t rape the victim and did not participate in her killing.  This basically means that Mukesh Singh should not hang as he was only driving the bus. He didn’t rape nor murder. 

Was he an accomplice? Was he a co-conspirator? Can we believe what he is saying?  We don’t know because this documentary just shows us clips of what clearly appears to be an extended interview. 

This is why we critique this documentary as being nothing more than a voyueristic exercise. No actual information or good was conveyed by it. 

(For six long hours, Dibang interviewed Mukesh Singh) 

B) The issues of propriety 

Mukesh Singh’s appeal is currently pending in the Supreme Court. India has what is known as the “rarest of rare” test when it comes to determining if a crime is worthy of the death penalty or not. One of the key elements of that test is if the crime shocks the conscience of society or not. This is a factual test. The facts need to be weighed. I don’t think a longer explanation is required to establish if the airing of this documentary will affect the pending appeal or not. 

More importantly, this was pointed out to the BBC and the director. They were well aware of the fact that an appeal was pending. Yet the entire documentary discusses nothing but facts. Factual circumstances that led to the incident, the facts behind the incident and the consequences thereof. These are facts that are clearly in dispute. The accused continue to maintain that they are not-guilty in their appeals. How will sharing alleged factual information, about facts that are in dispute not affect the judicial process?

The truth of the matter though is this. If Mukesh Singh was a white man on death row in England, I’m pretty sure the BBC wouldn’t air documentary discussing the factual circumstances of his case while his appeal was pending. It becomes okay when the accused is brown. When western countries try to discuss India-related issues, it is important that they express not just the issue, but also the context behind it, the process that is involved. These standards often change when it comes to brown people. This is perhaps what is most offensive about this documentary. Here you have a British filmmaker, who apparently spent two years in India trying to get to the bottom of this case, deciding that it is not worth it to wait for the process to finish.

The Supreme Court should be seized of this matter by the end of this year (hopefully). Was it not possible to wait till 2016 so the process is over? Was it absolutely necessary to air the documentary when the Government of India expressed grave reservations about it on the grounds that it could affect the appeal? Further, feminists across this country have been saying that the film should have been released after the appeal was over. Did it really make sense to air it now?  

Perhaps the outrage is because, the only real victory from the protests after the incident was law reform. We finally managed to get a committee to make recommendations and amend the law relating to sexual violence. (Something the film conveniently ignores) By going after the process and expressing contempt towards the same, the BBC and the director have done only one thing. They have tried to say that those protests were worthless.

But this is not true. The incident did change India, we are now discussing sexual violence openly. Taxi drivers have spoken to me at length many times about the patriarchy, something that would have been unheard of earlier. Women are finally being seen as People in India. This is after an extremely long and painful struggle to make this happen.

All this film does is relegate them to the status of being “Daughters”, albeit “India’s Daughters”.