Break the silence
Films like 'India's Daughter' need to be shown, just as Uganda faced up to the truth of the AIDS crisis in the '90s.
NUPUR BASU explains why confronting reality helps. Pix: Citizenfour poster
NDTV’s blank screen protest on March 9th at the time when British filmmaker Leslee Udwin’s documentary, India's Daughter, had been originally slotted was clearly novel. The channel relayed the messages from different quarters criticising the ban on the BBC documentary.
The blank screen reminded me of the famous blank edit page in the seventies that the Indian Express' Chief Editor, S. Mulgaonkar, had carried in protest against Mrs Indira Gandhi's declaration of emergency and the gag on the press.
As the dust settles, India has begun to resemble its neighbour, China. The Chinese government has clamped down on a documentary on air pollution made by a Chinese television journalist, Chai Jing, titled Under the Dome.
The film, which in the initial days had tens of millions of hits on the video sharing site Youku, suddenly disappeared and appears to have been officially censored. After some initial positive comments on the film, the government had a change of heart and the country’s propaganda chief reportedly told the media not to promote the film which confronts the issue of smog in Beijing as a new ‘mother’ and attacks those responsible for extreme pollution.
In contrast, the US did not ban the critical documentary, Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras. Describing the documentary which has just won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, Wikipedia says: “After Laura Poitras received encrypted emails from someone with information on the government’s massive covert-surveillance programmes, she and her reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet the sender. The sender was no other than Edward Snowden.”
The film is both riveting and disturbing. Though highly critical of the government, it has had a free run in the US. In India, a film like this, under the present circumstances, would have run into ‘censor’ problems and the directors would probably have been arrested under the National Security Act.
In 2000, I visited Uganda on the sidelines of the AIDS Congress in Durban. Uganda was reporting 30 per cent AIDS cases, one of the highest in the region. We had gone to witness, first hand, how Uganda was dealing with this massive crisis. We visited villages like Rakai where we saw the most heartbreaking scenes of houses where only infants remained, both parents having died of AIDS. I remember reporting those stories on NDTV from Uganda.
We found through our travels across Uganda that the first thing they had done was have a country wide movement to ‘break the silence’ over AIDS. The campaign was led by none other than the top political leadership, President Museveni, and carried on by grassroots health workers, educators and the media. So effective was the campaign, that before long, they managed to bring down the numbers from a shocking 30 per cent to 18 per cent. It was one of the most eye-opening campaigns I have witnessed. The words ‘Break the Silence” have stayed with me and very often, in the Indian and South Asian context, I wish we could do the same.
Imagine if President Museveni had said that the world was trying to ‘shame’ Uganda by citing AIDS figures of 30 per cent. Just imagine how the pandemic would have spread further. Instead, he accepted the figures as a challenge and went about formulating policies across the country to tackle AIDS. Both China and India need to learn some lessons from Uganda.
Egypt has just banned a satirist, Basseim Youssef, and taken his TV show off air. In an interview to Christian Amanpour of CNN he said “I was an equal opportunities joker but I didn’t get an equal opportunities audience. Will there be TV channels that will air what I have to say? I don’t think so and it is not likely that I will be back on air soon.”
In the same programme, Amanpour talked about how the Indian government had completely missed the point by seeing India’s Daughter not as “damage to women but seeing it as damage to the image of the nation.”
The argument of the “white person who has come to teach us about our culture and lecture to us” is tired and done-to-death and stems from an inferiority complex. The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire was critiqued by many quarters in India. They forgot that the screenplay was based originally on a book by respected Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup.
Satyajit Ray too was censured for portraying India’s poverty. In the last forty years, Indian filmmakers have time and again been criticised for questioning the status quo on communal conflict, displacement due to big dams and nuclear power stations.
We cannot claim from every rooftop that ‘India is a superpower’ when we cannot provide a safe country for our daughters to grow up in. Not only is a woman raped in India every 22 minutes, the latest sex ratio once again shows skewed figures in favour of the male child.
I have started re-reading Katherine Mayo’s Mother India which was dismissed as ‘a gutter inspector’s report’ and banned in India for telling some home truths on the condition of India’s women. What surprises me is how little has changed nearly 90 years since the book was written.
(Nupur Basu is the director of No Country for Young Girls telecast on BBC World in 2008.)
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