Let's face it, India hates its daughters
Through India’s Daughter, the Beeb usurped us all: The Indian media, activists and government, and more power to it. This spells trouble for our ungenerous and controlling rulers bent upon regimentation and self-promotion. The corporation did a masterful thing in releasing the documentary on YouTube – "with a slight change of schedule" as a soft northern accent warned us in a filler, no doubt fearing a ban later in the day.
Perhaps, just as home minister Rajnath Singh’s ire and embarrassment at the way men think in this country peaked. And indeed, how shameful for a nation selling its great ancientness as panacea, while large collectives of men in the real India, where I sit and stand and hail an autorickshaw, are incapable of keeping it together at seeing a woman out in the street at the wrong time. It’s not as if they have a caliph telling them to behave this way. This is what they choose to do freely.
The BJP is selling "civilisation", and cats in suits and jail uniforms jump out of the bag, spouting casual misogyny in almost identical terms. We are agog at one hate speech by a borderline psycho who thinks women are flowers, and another who threatens arson to his daughter’s person. These men are following orders. They have the terrible agency of the possessed but the enemy is subtle as pure air. The banality of evil is all around us.
Women’s safety is an emergency because in all places in India, there is so little of it. A police official in the film said that the city was safe. Yes, but only for the men. Even homes are not safe for women. Let’s be honest, not even wombs are safe, as Leila Seth said quoting an illustrative and gruesome statistic, where of 1,000 foeticides investigated at a Bombay hospital, 999 were revealed to be female foetuses.
The BBC is a well-oiled machine that answers to its constantly evolving global, and demanding, audience at home. It does so as a business call to the whingeing, TV licence fee-paying British public that must shell out for having a "telly" in their homes – not paying lands you in jail. Freedom of speech is the right of a free press, and not optional in a democracy as without it we can have no other guarantee for freedom. This is applicable in India too, and protected by this country’s Constitution. The number of doubts, misjudgments and liberties that the BBC is being accused of, you’d think it was drunk Delhi journalists heckling the shrill and irritating Arnab Goswami.
Going forward, the Indian bureaucracy is likely to make it more difficult for international news organisations to do their work. Media activists are wasting precious time, for instance, wringing their hands about whether a much-maligned and condemned undertrial was wrongly interviewed. Who cares? Of course Mukesh Singh - a rapist's voice - was the only one missing in the narrative about Nirbhaya created by the world’s media – and take it or leave it, an interview with him is a fresh angle. And frankly, it’s a great scoop. Only the best journalists manage those.
Basically, if you are willing to take the trouble and have the resources available, you may kick a hornet’s nest. But you need balls. And women have balls, too. Higher up. Journalists are combative and it’s nice when they know someone has their back. What a great and unfamiliar feeling.
Point is an employer standing up for a story is enviable from the perspective of an Indian journalist. Here the press is free but everywhere, for perplexing reasons, it is in chains. Ask Indian journalists how stories disappear off the www; without as much as a warning or a how-do-you-do, author pages go missing. It’s tiring.
Besides, yes, an undertrial may be interviewed, a dead rape victim, named; entrapment is illegal but if a sting is undertaken it must be over a matter of adequate national interest (due to limited resources). A journalist’s opinion is allowed as long as it is fair comment, but the burden of proof – if defamation or libel is alleged – lies with the aggrieved party, not the journalist. This makes them a pain in the ass with the establishment, part of the job description.
Totally uninspiring journalists are allowed to carry on work as long as they keep their heads down, but ones who do too many challenging stories often do so at their own peril. Journalists don’t just get fired because they are bad, usually it’s because they are rather good.
But the BBC is so white at the top it’s no surprise it’s taken for a vehicle of imperialism. Truth is, imperialist or not, the BBC has earned a prodigious amount of soft power over the decades. Their challenging Narendra Modi may be a fine PR offensive, but it would be too cynical to suggest that Leslie Udwin or the BBC were being patronising or racist just because they are not as jaded as we are.
The BBC’s belief in the Nirbhaya case is likely to win wide support from even a UK suffering from prolonged recession, and harsh economic conditions make most people too blasé to care for just anyone’s daughter.
And India hates its daughters, let’s face it. India’s daughters are deeply and subtly maligned as liabilities unless they are mothers, wives, sisters: this is what most women feel. Like the surviving young wife of one of the rape-accused who asked what next after her husband is hanged?
In another way perhaps Indian women are perpetually daughters, never equals, always at the disposal of grown-ups and betters. A power equation which in my lifetime, at least, has been the rule – the lopsided sex ratio, the rampant foeticides, among other demographic tragedies –poorer, undernourished women who work at building sites, for instance. Like the one whose rapist son went missing for three years, who had wanted nothing else but enough food to eat in the last 11 years but never had enough.