The Government of India’s quixotic attempts to ban Leslee Udwin’s controversial BBC television documentary ‘India’s daughter’ on the horrifying rape and murder of young Nirbhaya on a Delhi bus in 2012, the barbaric lynching of an alleged rapist in Nagaland by a mob, and two horrible cases of sexual assault against girl children in Goa’s port city of Vasco, all on the eve of International Working Women’s Day, place today’s focus squarely on sexual crimes against women.
Far from being an ‘international conspiracy’, as Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Venkaiah Naidu facetiously described it, ‘India’s Daughter’ is a valuable portrait of just how regressive, primitive and backward the views of Indian men are towards women. While the public shocker has been the interview of an unrepentant Mukesh Singh, the driver of the bus in which the rape took place, blaming the girl for what happened and suggesting that if she had ‘allowed’ it, she might still have been alive, the real eye opener is defence lawyer A P Singh, who said: “In our culture there is no place for women.”
The rapists were poor, uneducated youth from backward rural areas in UP. A P Singh, on the other hand, is a post-graduate professional, a resident of New Delhi. He said that had his own daughter behaved like the late Nirbhaya, he would have no hesitation in taking her to his farmhouse and burning her alive before his family members. When a lawyer starts publicly talking about taking the law in his own hands and meting out rough justice, shouldn’t his peers in the Bar Council of India take action?
The Bar Council was scheduled to meet Friday evening to discuss Singh’s remarks. But is it going to do anything? For, the Council had even earlier issued him a notice over his rabid remarks on the rape victim in September 2013, but that is where the matter seems to have ended. The real tragedy is that the unabashed misogyny in A P Singh’s views seems to be mainstream in India, among khap panchayats, politicians and much of the educated middle class alike.
Does this mean there is no hope? Quite the contrary. The spontaneous and massive protests by young Delhi college students that followed the rape and murder of Nirbhaya – in the face of water cannons, lathi charges and tear gas – represent a real ray of hope. This is the constituency Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi lost when he abstained from identifying himself with this highly emotive issue. It is they that have propelled the Aam Admi Party (AAP) to its unprecedented electoral victory in Delhi recently.
Then there are Nirbhaya’s parents; her father, an airport loader, is the kind of forward-thinking male that India needs. Her housewife mother, said about her daughter’s birth: “We celebrated like she was a boy”. Parents like this may lack higher education, but they are what will build a new India that values its women.
It helps when the government puts its best foot forward. Under Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s Ladli Laxmi Yojana (LLY), more than Rs 4,500 crore has been deposited in bank accounts for over 18.62 lakh girls. Under the scheme, the state government buys National Savings Certificates for girls at the time their birth is registered. The deposit swells to more than Rs 1 lakh when the girl turns 21. Most important, to benefit from the scheme, the girl child has to go to school. This has been duplicated in other states, including Goa.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Beti Bacho-Beti Padhao’ campaign is a good start. But the message gets muddled when his government starts seeing an ‘international conspiracy’ in an honest film that holds out a mirror to India’s patriarchal hangovers. Bans aren’t going to prevent the world from knowing about rape in India and the shameful attitudes of our menfolk. Rather, the government should promote documentaries like ‘India’s Daughter’, so that Indian society can discuss these issues openly. Otherwise, we are simply going to see more sexual violence (like in Vasco) and more reactions like the barbaric Nagaland lynching.
In the ’70s and ’80s, the advertisements for the women’s cigarette brand ‘Virginia Slims’, reached out to young professional women with the slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby”. India’s women still have a long, long way to go.
