Why focus on India when gender discrimination and rape is a global issue?
It was not the horrific rape that made me come to India. The extraordinary, courageous and unprecedented protests that followed made me think: “My God, they are fighting for my rights in India.” I was so grateful. I have myself been raped. It is not surprising -- one in five women globally have been raped. So I am one of the 20 per cent.
The supreme irony is that my film has got statistics at the end of it of offences against women in every country in the world. By their ban, the government forced the BBC version, and not the India version, to be leaked onto YouTube. If you ban something, the first thing you do is to make every person in the world see a pirated version. And that is what has happened. The tragedy for me is that the pirated copy that went up on YouTube does not have the global statistics, and for a reason that is mundane and ridiculous.
The BBC Storyville has a house style that doesn’t allow them to put statistics on a film. It upsets and angers me that people in India would have seen the film without those statistics.
There are three version of the film. In the BBC version, the credits are shorter and there are no statistics. The international version is the full version with all the credits and the statistics. It also names the rape victim, as her name is all over the international media, and even in Wikipedia. The third is the Indian version in which the victim has not been names. That is the law in India, which we all respect. The parents wanted her name out of the Indian version but agreed that it be carried in the international version.
So now the YouTube version has got so many heads that I am trying every day to cut them down with a sword. My team has pulled down the online version thousands of times because I want to obey that ban, as it is India’s law. But unfortunately it has now got into Torrent.
‘I am not a fly-by-night operator’ - The Hindu