Anniversary of Delhi brave heart, December 2014. Demotix/Rohit Gautam. All rights reserved.India’s Daughter, a documentary film directed by Leslee Udwin as part of the BBC’s Storyville series, based on the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder of a 23-year old woman, was to be broadcast in India and the UK on International Women’s Day, March 8. But in India, it was banned. Some women’s organisations who have been working on issues of gender justice in India were supportive of the court restraint until the trial is completed. However, given the BJP government’s long history of jingoistic nationalism and moral policing of women, it is unsurprising that many in India read this as a politically motivated ‘ban’.
This is not the first time that Indian women have found their issues being compromised through intervention of a ‘foreigner’ that raises the hackles of nationalist bullies who believe that national pride and India’s ‘image’ should be maintained at all costs. Before India’s Daughter, we had Katherine Mayo’s controversial Mother India, published in 1927. But in recent times, especially since the emergence of the ‘Nirbhaya Movement’, Indian women have emphatically refused the terms of the choice that asks them to choose between their gender and their national identity. And here, I am not referring to feminist activists, academics or articulate students in elite institutions, who can perhaps be viewed as unrepresentative on account of their elite status. I am referring to women who inhabit mainstream cultural spaces, such as the actress Mallika Sherawat, who publicly shut up nationalist bullying from a journalist and stood by her statement that Indian society is a regressive place for women. I am also referring to Suzette Jordan from Kolkata, mother of two, who gave up her anonymous naming as the ‘Park Street Rape survivor’ and had the clarity to retort to allegations of being ‘an escort’ with the question, is it ok for an escort to be raped?
Rape culture is not new in India. The moral policing of women, the blaming of victims, the permissibility of a woman’s ‘character’ as evidence against her credibility in court have all been longstanding issues facing women’s quest for justice in India. Neither is it news to Indian women that rape culture is widespread in our society. We live with it, and our responses have covered the whole range from outrage, satire of sexist comments that belittle women protesters as ‘painted and dented ladies,’ pragmatic conservatism to internalization.
