India’s Daughter: Looking Evil in the Eye

Dur­ing the Nurem­berg tri­als, the pros­e­cu­tion inter­viewed Rudolph Hoss, the SS Kom­man­dant of the Auschwitz Con­cen­tra­tion Camps, about his oper­a­tion where he gassed 2.5 mil­lion Jew­ish pris­on­ers to death. When asked whether he felt remorse about what he did, he said “Does a rat catch­er feel bad about killing rats?” The army psy­chol­o­gist Cap­tain GM Gilbert who inter­viewed the Nazi lead­ers on tri­al, said and I quote, “I was search­ing for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defin­ing it. A lack of empa­thy. It’s the one char­ac­ter­is­tic that con­nects all the defen­dants.”

This same sen­ti­ment was reflect­ed by Mukesh Singh, one of the con­vict­ed rapists in the Nirb­haya Case in the ‘India’s Daugh­ter’ doc­u­men­tary. A chill­ing lack of remorse or guilt, where he blamed the vic­tim reit­er­at­ing the ‘she asked for it’ argu­ment. Even as the Indi­an gov­ern­ment banned the tele­cast of the doc­u­men­tary, the web has catered to all curios­i­ty, allow­ing every­one with an inter­net or a phone con­nec­tion to watch the film. I too have seen the film, and found it to be a sto­ry of how India rose against crimes against women in the face of this despi­ca­ble crime. Most impor­tant­ly, it laid bare the sin­is­ter mind­set of those capa­ble of com­mit­ting such crimes, giv­ing the per­cep­tion of the mind­set of a rapist a ter­ri­fy­ing dose of real­i­ty. If any­thing, this film has wok­en us up to a face of evil that lurks with­in our soci­ety, strength­en­ing the case for the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty for the crime of rape and weak­en­ing if not nul­li­fy­ing the human rights defence put up by those who defend rapists. This film has refo­cused our atten­tion to the lethar­gy of the judi­cial sys­tem and the real­i­ty that despite the Nirb­haya Case and the anti-rape law, our faith in the law is yet to be reward­ed.

Yet, the media and the polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion went on a dif­fer­ent and triv­ial tan­gent, where it seems the film has jeop­ar­dized the image of India. The ratio­nale from the gov­ern­ment to ban the film may be legal yet the polit­i­cal argu­ment is very selec­tive. The argu­ment that it defames India is com­plete­ly nar­row-mind­ed, reflec­tive of those who haven’t seen the film. Crime sto­ries are read and seen all over the world via the web. Will the gov­ern­ment use the same ratio­nale to ban the report­ing of rape inci­dents? The same argu­ment could have been used for the doc­u­men­tary ‘Born into the Trade’ about chil­dren of sex work­ers in Kolkata who are groomed into the flesh trade, which went onto win the Oscar for best doc­u­men­tary. The same argu­ment was in fact made against ‘Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire’, but thank­ful­ly the film was not banned by the gov­ern­ment at the time. The documentary’s achieve­ment is that it has punched our sen­si­bil­i­ties with a grue­some real­i­ty, a social malaise that can be found in every oth­er coun­try. Let’s be clear, this is not an India cen­tric prob­lem. Cit­i­zens includ­ing the gov­ern­ment are hor­ri­fied but we shouldn’t be embar­rassed by what it has revealed. We should be angry at the slow pace of the case and ques­tion the gov­ern­ment why after months of the con­vic­tion, Mukesh Singh and the oth­er con­victs aren’t clos­er to the noose. We should be angry at why the much tout­ed notions of ‘swift jus­tice’ and ‘fast track courts’ have become a joke despite the nature of the crime.

This doc­u­men­tary should be seen by every­one to keep our blood boil­ing. When­ev­er a rape is report­ed in the coun­try, activists, lawyers, politi­cians, judges, jour­nal­ists should remem­ber Mukesh Singh’s words and have no doubt in their minds that swift con­vic­tion and swifter exe­cu­tion is essen­tial for the course of jus­tice. Mukesh Singh’s tes­ti­mo­ny shows that those who com­mit rape do not deserve the sym­pa­thy of the law or India’s cit­i­zens. Away from the human rights argu­ment and the legal jar­gon, there should be no doubt that men like him and the oth­er con­victs should be culled from soci­ety imme­di­ate­ly and sent to the gal­lows.

‘Show me the true face of evil, to strength­en my resolve to van­quish it’, is a phi­los­o­phy that has been enshrined in every right­eous strug­gle across the world. Human­i­ty has endured evil for cen­turies because time and again we mus­tered the courage to con­front the demons that live among us. Sim­i­lar to a can­cer, they can­not be rea­soned with and are pure with their intent. They have been put down and destroyed in the past and human­i­ty has been bet­ter for it. India’s Daugh­ter has exposed anoth­er demon to us. His tes­ti­mo­ny spits in the face of our jus­tice sys­tem and every par­ent, man and woman in India. There are some moments where vengeance, jus­tice and human­i­ty all con­verge and we must be wise to under­stand it. Nour­ish and reward our faith in jus­tice – that is all the Indi­an peo­ple ask for.