India's Daughter is India's shame, but why won't Udwin say so?
Leslee Udwin has left the country even as reports emerge that she might have paid Mukesh Singh for the interview that appears in her documentary India's Daughter. There are also reports that she may have misled the home ministry and Tihar authorities by claiming that she was looking to make a more general film by interviewing inmates charged with crimes against women. The permission may have been granted on that account. It is reported that she interviewed six different men accused of anti-women crimes but only Mukesh Singh's testimony makes it to the documentary.
As for the documentary itself, all the publicity surrounding its banning has ensured that it will be watched by many more people than would have otherwise been the case. The question of why Udwin chose to include Mukesh's despicable statements in the documentary is worth investigating. Since the statements came to light, a national debate on the appropriateness of highlighting such sentiments has ensued. One section believes it is in the fitness of things that all such views be brought to light because this is what many Indian men must believe in any case for the culture of rape to be so pervasive in this country. Another group says it is wrong to give voice to someone who shows not a sliver of repentance for his actions. In this telling, the filmmaker has sullied Nirbhaya's memory by cutting open the wound afresh.
While I am all for freedom of expression, the question of director's intent is an important one in a case like this. There is no editorial judgement exercised by Udwin in the documentary. There is only the presentation of facts. There are countless interviews with people who were related in some or the other respect to Nirbhaya. But there is no sense of right and wrong, no stress on the fact that justice needs to be done. It's a melange of so many voices relating to the incident. In one scene, the wife of another accused Akshay Thakur's shown saying she will kill herself and her child if he is hanged. There is no context to this scene, and one wonders if it is included to make the viewer see that there is a larger picture to the crime than its laissez faire brutality. Should we sympathise with Akshay's wife as she envisions a dark future ahead of her? Should we feel sorry for Mukesh's mother who is shown grieving the suicide of her other son, Mukesh's brother who was also an accused and killed himself in jail?
As for Mukesh, the film gives him ample screen time. We already know what he said about women being out late etc, but in the film he speaks much more. He gives an account of the night according to which everything that happened was an outcome of what Nirbhaya and her friend did. They got on a bus at 8 o' clock; the friend responded with aggression when Mukesh taunted him on being out with a girl; Nirbhaya herself hurled abuses at the men. "She would not keep quiet as we raped her. She kept shouting for help," Mukesh says, as if trying to make the viewer see. He is entirely blameless in his own mind and clearly expects the viewer to believe his innocence. The nub of his argument is: "I did nothing wrong. This is how we play". Listening to him, it appears that he might have convinced even himself that he did a social good by eliminating Nirbhaya who might not have died if only she had played by the "rules".
Sure, there is an argument to be made for showcasing the mind of a rapist justifying his crime within the dominant sociocultural context that he believes operates with impunity. But we don't know if that is indeed the film's aim. Udwin does not take any sides. If the goal was to show a mirror to society and thereby perhaps help shape perceptions, who is to say that a section of viewers will not agree with Mukesh and his lawyer and find their own views reflected on screen? The problem is not that Mukesh is shown saying what he does but that the director chooses to adopt a blatantly neutral stance in a film that purports to speak for Nirbhaya.
The one person who comes across as utterly broken in India's Daughter is Nirbhaya's mother. She says she knew from day one that her daughter would not survive. The doctors at Safdarjung had told her so. Yet Nirbhaya was carried from one hospital to the other to satisfy all stakeholders, including the media. Just before she died, Nirbhaya apologised to her for the trouble she had caused her mother.