South Asia Citizens Web

India’s Daughter is a powerful and sensitive documentary that is part of a global campaign against rape, violence against women, and gender inequality. It explores the life and dreams of an extraordinary young woman, brutally ended. The tension between her story and the outrageously reactionary social attitudes expressed on camera gives the documentary its power. The government’s ban has no leg, social, moral, or legal, to stand on.

February 21 resonates with special meaning for Bangladeshis. That morning in 1952, hundreds of students of what was then known as Dacca University, came to their campus to protest against restrictions placed on public assembly. The students were part of the movement that sought equal recognition for the language spoken most widely in East Bengal, and the mother-tongue of most — Bangla. Bangladesh was part of Pakistan then, and the national language was Urdu.

On the one hand this could be an attempt by these women to reassert control over the Indian conversation about rape and women’s rights, feeling that British filmmaker Leslee Udwin has taken it away from them with this film. That’s understandable, from an intersectional viewpoint, and also an anti-imperialist one. I can see the argument that a white woman has swooped in and made statements about India – “a sick culture” – that Indian feminists would find insulting. Yet it’s not hard to see that the sick culture Udwin refers to is the rape culture that is actually sick and diseased. Should an Indian woman have made this documentary? Perhaps. Was it wrong for a British woman to do so? I don’t think so.

Senior journalist and Outlook Group’s editorial chairman Vinod Mehta died at 72.

A few days ago our finance minister and the legal brain of the current government Mr Arun Jaitley spoke in a conference and said that ‘you can not ban anything in the current age of information’. ‘How can any government ban any thing when the flow of information is so far and vast he said’. It is not more than a month when the government was seen hiding itself in the war cries of nationalism and arrogance of ‘we will see’ and ‘India’s reputation is being targeted’.