14 reasons why I won’t watch ‘India’s Daughter’

The ban on ‘India’s Daughter’ has raised hackles. Some are for it, and some against.

This piece gives you the 14 reasons why I won’t be watching the documentary, ban or no ban.

1. I won’t be watching the ‘Daughter of India’. I did not watch it before the ban, nor do I intend watching it now.

2. Why? Let me explain. I know what I want to know. There is nothing in ‘India’s Daughter’ or any other documentary that can add to what I already know about rape in India.

3. I know the brutality that lurks in the male Indian mind towards a woman, especially one who is seen to be breaking societal codes by overstaying at night, expanding her freedoms or making choices as a modern citizen of this land.

4. Such choices often telegraph to a diseased mind the idea that she has overstepped her limits, is out of her comfort zone, in fact, out of his comfort zone, and is therefore fair game for exploitation, even violation.

5. What can the documentary tell me that I don’t know already? That this disease of treating women as playthings of the moment is deeply ingrained.

6. That this attitude is not, as is commonly believed, just the preserve of lumpen young men from underprivileged backgrounds. Check the statistics and you will realise that the violation of women is very secular, cutting across caste, creed and station in life.

7. This is the result of a toxic value system that is ingrained in the mind, flowing through the veins in homes and seeping onto the streets of India. Whatever a certain kind of man may say for public consumption with a view to being politically correct, deep down in the inner recesses of our combined societal being, the boy is still more equal than the girl.

8. Until that changes at the real sub-conscious level, nothing will change, and India’s daughters will be denied the respect they deserve.

9. What can the documentary tell me that I don’t know already? That we have a patriarchal criminal justice system under which the victim of male brutality dies a hundred deaths before she is dead, at the hands of the rapists and then the lawyers and the courts. In India, as far as rapists are concerned, the wheels of justice grind both very slow and very fine.

10. I won’t watch India’s Daughter for another reason. I just can’t bring myself to undergo the retelling of the violation of another human’s body, dignity and freedom. I just don’t have the stomach.

11. But I do believe I have the stomach to respect other human beings, however imperfect, at home, in the workplace, on the streets.

12. I won’t watch the documentary, but I am against the ban. For, it is each person’s right to decide whether or not to do so, based on individual sensibilities.

13. I am also against the state being the sole arbiter of society’s moral compass. Because then, you’re on a very slippery slope.

14. If the government thinks we’re smart enough to vote it to power, it should grant us the same smarts in deciding what is acceptable or not to each one of us. Bans of this sort reflect the government’s lack of confidence in us, its view of us as essentially immature and irresponsible.

So, go ahead and watch the film if you will, and more power to you.

I certainly won’t.