India's Daughter: How bans are a slippery slope to hell
Why do we, as a nation, love bans so much? Our feminist activists seem to love them as much as our indoor-toting women politicians. The language of bans is one of power-play, and when that fails, it quickly takes recourse to violence. We have seen it in the case of Charlie Hebdo in France, and more recently, Avijit Roy's murder in Dhaka. Militant groups asked for an end to publication of the periodical in the first case, and a ban on the author's books in the second case, and later perpetrated the worst kind of violence against them. When feminists and liberals raise the call for banning works like Yo-Yo Honey Singh's songs full of crude and tasteless lyrics, they should be aware that they might be walking into a trap which could cost them dearly.
State and law can often work entirely without nuance, and a ban against a film, song or book "inciting" violence against women could be used as precedent to banning the staging of say, the famously gender-empowering Vagina Monologues in our country in the future because it too uses strong language and imagery about women.
Whether in the case of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in 1971 or Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers two decades later, public outcry after the films were released in USA drew a direct line between the film and resulting violence on the streets. In the case of the second film, the link was even more chillingly direct - a young couple watched the film in the movie theatre and immediately after went on a shooting spree killing almost a dozen people. In Kubrick's case, the outcry was so deafening that he had to withdraw the film and effectively ban its screening. But who were these people who asked for the ban? Both films were hugely popular with the youth who saw them as allegories for throwing off the yoke of social control. Those asking for a ban in both cases were religious leaders, city authorities, particularly those in charge of policing and crime control, and school authorities.
In asking for a ban against these works, these people achieved two ends - taking the spotlight off their own inability to create an atmosphere of security and social empowerment, as well as divesting themselves of the responsibility to encourage platforms which instead of banning these works, discussed them threadbare. Because bans are not just about power-play, they are also about reinforcing silence.
The documentary film about the December 12 gangrape in Delhi with the rather dodgy title "India's Daughter" which has over the last two days excited the imagination of our ban junkies yet again, may be a powerful, incisive look at violence against women in India, or an attempt to make rape look like an "Indian" problem. If it is the former, it deserves unreserved praise for helping the discussion around gender violence to continue; if it is the latter, it should receive unrelenting critique for adding weight to an already-existing prejudiced view. Under no circumstances, however, does it deserve a ban.