Vol. 79/No. 10      March 23, 2015

On Dec. 16, 2012, six men raped Singh, a call-center worker and medical student, when she and a male friend boarded a bus at 8:30 p.m. after seeing “The Life of Pi” film. Using an iron rod, they raped, beat and eviscerated her for an hour, beat her friend and dumped them both in a ditch. She died of massive internal injuries and brain damage nearly two weeks later.

In the days and weeks following the assault, thousands took to the streets. “There has been a huge reaction, almost like an explosion,” Sudha Sundararaman, general secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, told the Militant at the time. Authorities in New Delhi banned the protests and unleashed tear gas and water cannons on demonstrators.

Filmmaker Leslee Udwin’s documentary walks through the events that occurred the day of the rape and interviews Jyoti Singh’s parents and a friend. She also interviews in prison Mukesh Singh — the bus driver and one of the men convicted of the crime. All four of the adults convicted are appealing their death sentences. A 17-year-old boy was also convicted and is serving a three-year prison term.

“You can’t clap with one hand,” Mukesh Singh tells the film crew. “It takes two hands to clap. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9:00 at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” While he never says he was involved in the attack, he says the victim would not have been killed had she not fought back.

Udwin also interviewed two attorneys for the convicted men, A.P. Singh and M.L. Sharma.

“If my daughter or sister engaged in premarital activities and disgraced herself,” A.P. Singh says, “I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”

“In our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with any unknown person,” Sharma said. “She should not be put on the streets, just like food.”

The film contains substantial footage of some of the protests against rape, including police clubbing demonstrators. It features interviews with some leaders and participants in the fight for women’s rights, who give viewers a sense of the rapid changes taking place as women by the millions join the workforce and fight to end women’s second-class status. These battles are winning increasing support in the working-class and broader layers of society, male and female.

The mass debate and protests around the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh are not a sign of rising violence against women, people interviewed in the film explain, but the opposite — increasing intolerance of that violence.

“There are many gang-rapes that take place in India and they’ve been taking place over the years,” Leila Seth, former chief justice of Himachal Pradesh state and a member of a government committee set up after the 2012 protests to review laws pertaining to violence against women, says in the documentary. “But somehow this caught the imagination of people.”

Seth’s committee rejected calls for the death penalty for rape or for lowering the age limit of 18 below which juvenile offenders cannot be charged or sentenced as adults. It proposed ending the “marital exemption” in rape laws, which makes it impossible for a woman to accuse her spouse of rape.

Before 1975 every U.S. state had a “marital exemption,” but as a product of the fight for women’s rights they were all struck down by 1993.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh backed banning the documentary March 4. The government can’t permit anyone “to leverage such unfortunate incidents for commercial benefits,” he said.

“This is not a film for profit,” Udwin responded. BBC covered some 40 percent of the cost of production, she said. “The rest was funded by myself.”

“All I was trying to do was thank India for leading the world by example,” Udwin said, “for championing women’s rights.”  
 
 
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