)
The father of the Delhi bus rape victim has come out strongly in favour of airing Leslee Udwin’s documentary for BBC on the incident.
“The documentary India's Daughter holds up a mirror to society, it tells us how bad our mindset is, how we look at our own children. But how many of us are willing to look in the mirror and see what's there?” Badrinath Singh, the father of the victim, told The Economic Times newspaper.
“I don't understand why the government wanted to ban it. It is possible that they were fearing outrage and people taking to the streets after the telecast of the documentary. It could be a law and order concern for them. But for the truth to be known, it is necessary that the filth comes out too,” Singh was reported as saying.
Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old para-medical student, was gang-raped and brutalised in the wee hours of December 16, 2012, in a moving bus and later died of the horrific injuries she sustained.
Shortly after the incident sparked massive protests in the heart of Delhi, Udwin arrived in India to make a film about the incident, the protests that followed, and the general mindset that prevailed. As part of her film, she interviewed Mukesh Singh, one of the rapists, for about 16 hours, in the course of which he said that girls are more responsible for being raped than the men who commit the crime.
His statements ignited a national debate – from those who feel that the film is necessary to show up India’s patriarchy, those who feel that the interview of one of the rapists is a travesty, India’s Parliamentarians who have sought a government inquiry into how the interview took place, and a section that seeks to block the airing of the film in India on the grounds that it sullies the nation’s image.
“It disturbs me when people like him say it was the girl's fault that she was raped. But I have stopped getting angry now because many men, even from good families and with good degrees, seem to think like this. How can our daughters study and work freely if society thinks like this?” Badrinath Singh questioned in the interview.
“It is worse when politicians sitting in Parliament say the girl could have prevented rape. How can they make such irresponsible statements? Don't they understand that what they say will be heard by hundreds of people? I think these men have no respect for women, which automatically means they have no respect for their parents. Their thinking is sick,” he was quoted as saying.
Separately, Udwin told the Hindustan Times newspaper that she had obtained all the necessary permissions for the interview – including from the police and the rapist’s family.
Earlier Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi has said that Udwin had failed to follow certain conditions for the shoot. However, Udwin refuted the allegation, saying she the only condition was that she show the prison authorities all the raw footage to comply with security protocol. She added that three police officers had viewed the raw footage although they didn’t sit through the entirety of the screening.
