INDIA's DAUGHTER

Watched the “India's Daughter” documentary. I don’t know whether I should laugh or feel ashamed of being an Indian.

The BBC’s “India’s Daughter” – a documentary focusing on Nirbhaya’s case: the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23 year old girl from a middle class family in Delhi chasing her dreams all her life to become not a women but to become someone which defines her but sadly ending up being raped by a bunch of heartless monsters who assumed her to be the platter for dinner, which led to subsequent unprecedented widespread riots and protest about the safety of women in India.

The documentary also includes interviews with the two lawyers who defended the men convicted.

I think I died a little somewhere. Not appalled at what the rapists said but the lawyers. Forget about the rapists because they are behind the bars. I’m more concerned about those defence lawyers who made threatening comments viz.“Girls are more precious than diamond. If you put the diamond on road then the dog will take it out. You can’t stop it,” one of the defence lawyers says in the film. I fail to understand how someone can be so cruel! The most disgraceful statement that could ever been made that too by a government lawyer. It must be put into their head that “alone girl is not an opportunity, it’s a responsibility”.

It has been banned in India.  Government says it is embarrassing. But aren’t the rapes? Instead of banning documentaries, let's ban rape and injustice. The act of banning the documentary is akin to smashing the mirror because the mirror said ‘you are the ugliest of all’. Let’s accept it; we are offended by our own ugliness. We are offended, because a foreigner tells us we have the most sickening patriarchal mind-set in the world.

I believe the controversy is unfair and that those angry have not watched the film yet. It doesn't justify rape. Victim blaming has been a tradition in this country for a long time now! The more we deny that it is a systemic issue, the less we can solve this problem.

We stand in that society where justice becomes a big crime for the jurisdiction, where “we live in a perfect society wherein women have no place”, rapes are used as a weapon to “shame” the woman. This is precisely the reason why women are raped in political, communal and social conflicts. This denotes how the society looks at women and it also differentiates the rapes in India with other countries. Thus, the arguments that India is being singled out falls flat.

We have a bigger demon within our social structure and we refuse to identify it.

This has to be stopped because if being women means being raped then we refuse to be women. Don’t be silly, We are undefined stubborn dreamers and not objects! Call us whatever.