So What if Nirbhaya Documentary is banned?

I really can’t make out the fuss created over banning of Nirbhaya documentary-India’s Daughter. All the respected, educated, like-minded people, who are raising their voice against the ban, what are you trying to achieve? I completely echo your point when you say that there is nothing wrong with the documentary. But when you say this documentary needs to be shown to Indians to show them a mirror of the sick mind-set of majority of male Indians then sorry, that’s where I disagree.

Before I reason this out, here are 3 facts for your consumption:

1. The states with maximum cases of rapes are Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Assam (in that order-as per Wikipedia. These rankings are done after comparing the rapes with the population of that state). Whereas, if we go only by the highest number of cases then the ranking order is Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
2. Now consider this with around 19% of overall internet penetration in India. The state wise penetration is in single digits, with only the metros shining as the highest users of internet (as per Economic Times) and as per We are Social study only 11% of the internet users use the social media.
3. If it wasn’t banned, the documentary would have been telecasted on BBC channel/You Tube in India and not Doordarshan.

If these three facts are clear, then dear people, your target audience is not the urban class, it is the uneducated rural/semi-urban or even slums in metros population, who would have anyways not seen the documentary in the first place. And hence there is no change you could have brought in their mind-set by showing them this documentary.

Also, isn’t it an hypocritical attitude? The thing that stands out in the documentary is the view of the lawyer and the rapist; that they think that a woman is to be blamed for her rape. When you read a poster like this coming on your professional networking sites (read Linkedin), you press like and you want to share it. I am assuming this is because you have your boss in mind when you read this. You give up to the fact that you can’t change the way your boss thinks and acts and hence you change yourself to adjust to his style. And here you want to change the mind-set of millions of Indian males by showing them a documentary film? Isn’t this absurd?

Nirbhaya’s mother wept on national TV asking for justice. She says she had thought that rapes would decrease in the country after the national outrage witnessed in 2012. We all know the count has only increased.

Social Media campaigns are not going to make us safe because, the hue and cry is not reaching the potential rapists. It needs a big shift in everything around us-law and order, transportation facilities, education for women, toilets for every house etc. And I believe our current Prime Minister knows this. He chose to be silent on the documentary ban, but instead talked about release of Masarat Alam in J&K- a very wise thing to do. National issues are what we want the government to focus on and not TV documentaries.

I rest my case by saying that unless we are sure of the protection our states give us; we women need to accept that what the lawyer and rapist say in the documentary is actually the truth. We are a potential victim if we are in vulnerable public places. In fact, as per the reports, the highest number of rapes are by someone known to the victim, and hence before wanting to go out in the public crying for changing the way they think about us, we should be sure that the men of our family don’t see women as a sex object.