India’s Daughter, the act of documentary, and the obsession with true crime

Indian government officials banned “India’s Daughter,” a BBC documentary about the Delhi gang rape of 2012, from broadcast in India this week, citing a danger to women’s safety. But it still circulated on YouTube inside and outside the country after the ban, until Google complied with the government’s requests and blocked copies of the film on the video-sharing site in India.

Now the BBC has launched a much more severe, global ban—the broadcaster has asked Google to remove all copies of the documentary, viewable anywhere in the world, from YouTube, citing copyright infringement. Just as dozens of blogs and mainstream media outlets were trumpeting the ability of the internet, and international media, to circumvent the Indian government’s controversial ban, the film is no longer available online.

To view the documentary outside of the UK, you’ll need to use a private VPN or create a fake IP address in the UK.   

“When a copyright holder notifies us of a video that infringes their copyright we remove the content promptly in accordance of the law,” Google told Quartz, explaining why the video has been removed from YouTube. The BBC’s press office didn’t respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

Leslee Udwin and the team behind the documentary India’s Daughter had interviewed Delhi’s Tihar jail inmate Mukesh Singh. Was Singh, one of the six men convicted for gang-raping a young woman in Delhi in 2012, trying to make a case that his death sentence should be dropped, especially since he insists on camera that he only drove the vehicle and didn’t participate in the ghastly attack that eventually claimed the life of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern?

Since India’s Daughter doesn’t attempt to crawl inside Singh’s head to understand him better, he remains transparent. The rare access to Singh that was granted by the Tihar prison authority’s lays bare his rancid views on women in general and the victim in particular. His thoughts are distressing enough to box the film. As such the information and broadcasting ministry has debarred television networks from broadcasting the documentary in any form.

The ministry feels that the “telecast of these excerpts appear to compromise the role of the media as the upholder of constitutional values as the fourth pillar of our democracy.”

The ministry has been pilloried for the ban, and its decision will be discussed across the globe.

 A new, and potentially profitable, narrative has been built around the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) co-production: India’s Daughter is now the documentary that the Indian government doesn’t want the world to see. NDTV24x7, which has seen a potential hit slip out of its hands in a matter of days, has been screaming itself hoarse in protest.  As such on March 8^th, which is observed as Women’s Day NDTV24x7 had aired an image titled India’s daughter as a form of protest against the government in spite of incurring huge amount of revenue loss? 

India’s Daughter has been billed as no mere documentary, but that rare thing in the world of non-fiction film: an event. It was to have been broadcast simultaneously in several countries on International Women’s Day, but the BBC took advantage of the uproar in India to advance the screening in the UK to March 4. According to the Guardian, a red-carpet screening has been planned in New York on March 9, to be graced by the likes of actresses Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto. This will mark the launch of a worldwide campaign for gender equality with the same title as the film.

India’s Daughter does not replicate the strategy adopted by the Act of Killing. Instead, it assembles information and stories that have circulated in the national media ever since the crime. There are also interviews with women’s rights activist and former judges, as well as two damning conversations with the rapists’ defence lawyers not heard. All of these have been depicted before, but gain greater force since they have been strung together in one piece.

The best judge of what India’s Daughter achieves should be its intended television audience.

India’s Daughter might reinforce public opinion that Singh and his cohorts are monsters, but it also emphasises his ordinariness. The film is titled India’s Daughter, but it is also about one of India’s sons.

Gargi Purkayastha
Msc.Media || PG:1