Dear government, so I watched India's Daughter

Dear government,

So I watched Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter, which you banned yesterday. It is on YouTube and has already been watched by many on their phones and computers and the link has been shared many times over on Facebook and Twitter. So much for your ban. If you still do not know what the film is about, and it is unlikely that you did before you banned it, here is what it says.

It is the many voices of India, a country where views clash and collide, where Mukesh Singh and five others raped a girl because “a decent girl won’t roam around at nine in the evening”; where a girl dreamt of becoming a doctor and building a hospital in her village; where an 11-year-old boy ran away from his poor home but ended up, five years later, sexually assaulting a girl in a moving bus; where a father sold his land to educate his daughter; where a mother recalls the last words of her dying child who was viciously assaulted; where a lawyer says he will set fire to his own daughter at his “farmhouse” if she indulged in “pre-marital activities”; where a mother asks, whenever there is a crime, why is the girl hauled up, why are the boys not accused? There is even the story of a ten-year-old street child who tried to rob the girl’s purse and when she asked him, “Why did you do it?” he replied, “I also want new clothes like you people, I want new shoes.”

These stories have been told separately, in different reports, in various contexts, but when put side by side, it reveals a complex picture. India’s Daughter shows tight close-ups of two Indias: An aspirational, ambitious India, which wants to break through the barriers of class and gender right in the heart of the capital, and a misogynistic India which wants to punish and rape and kill the girl who goes for a movie in the evening.

This one-hour documentary has been careful in not having an accented narratorial voice that could sound judgemental: Instead, it is mainly told through the girl’s parents as well as the accused, their family members and lawyers, plus television reports of the case. That is why Leslee Udwin here is not a white woman with a saviour complex. Instead it is BJP's Meenakshi Lekhi and many others in Parliament who have displayed a persecution complex, crying "conspiracy" and "defamation".

As many feared, it is not Mukesh Singh’s voice that is overpowering the debate. It is his attitude – commonplace, callous, despicable. As many feared, the documentary is not voyeuristic, although there is an unnecessary shot of a mother seemingly feeding her child and a close-up of strange men staring at a picture of a skimpily-clad woman.

India’s Daughter is about the horror and tragedy of December 16, 2012. But it shows the template for many crimes in the country: the attitude that the girl is inviting sexual assault by the way she dresses, moves; that the girl is easy prey; that the girl has no right over her body.

Dear government, there is nothing to fear in this documentary. But there is a lot to learn. And that is why you should unban it.