A great deal of energy has been invested by the Indian authorities in ensuring that its citizens do not see a BBC documentary film called India’s Daughter, which analyses the gang rape and murder of a woman in Delhi. That effort would have been better deployed in fighting the terrible abuses that are meted out against women.
India is proud to call itself the world’s largest democracy. The country has been led by a female prime minister and a female president; it has women judges and police officials. Its prime minister, Narendra Modi, pledged on election to make women “an equal and integral part of our development journey”. Yet the everyday reality for women is of sexual harassment known as “Eve-teasing”, of sex-selective abortion, of maternal malnutrition, of acid attacks and domestic violence. It is time for Mr Modi to make good on his promise.
No single solution can hope to cure these social ills. After the 2012 rape that is the subject of India’s Daughter, the authorities sentenced to death most of the young men who had participated in the crime. A women’s safety fund has been set up, so have rape crisis centres. Under pressure to demonstrate that India is not a misogynous society, the finance minister, Arun Jaitley, has promised to top up the fund in the latest budget. He justified his action, though, by declaring that “one small incident of rape” was costing India billions of dollars in international tourist revenue.
The shock value of the documentary film is the small gap between the words of the rapist interviewed and the public statements by Indian politicians, who seek to offload some of the blame for rape on the victims themselves. “Rapes take place also because of a woman’s clothes, her behaviour and her presence at inappropriate places,” said a female politician from Maharashtra state. The jailed rapist says much the same thing to the film-makers: the woman’s mistake, he said, was to resist the attack.
Mr Modi must place himself at the spearhead of a cultural revolution against such attitudes. Even when the judiciary functions as it should, even when young women find the courage to report rape, the system fails too often. Heavy sentencing fails to deter because of the deeply entrenched prejudices of a society in flux. In the rush to growth, the number of women in the Indian workforce has doubled over two decades. For those who have moved from traditional villages to the increasingly cosmopolitan cities, it is still evidently shocking to see women occupying responsible positions, commuting to and from offices and using new technology. The idea that progress is male-driven and that independent female behaviour leads to a loss of virtue forms the backdrop to India’s miserable record of sexual abuse. Mr Modi, a self-declared modernising prime minister, must confront this dilemma.
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Banning the BBC film, supposedly because it glorifies the unremorseful rapist, is precisely the wrong way of tackling the problem. Masking these crimes has created a tolerance towards sexual assault and humiliation. Brave women defied the ban yesterday and mounted a private showing of the film in Agra. The organiser was arrested. The audience hooted its dismay. That is India today and it is for its leader not to stand above the fray but to take sides: to stand up for a 21st-century India, to acknowledge the country’s ills and to banish the darkness.