The documentary India's Daughter prominently features a journey through the nation's most atrocious assault on a young woman, the anger it provoked among the Indians, the description of the gruesome incident from one of the rapists and his remorseless attitude towards the heinous crime.
The documentary will premiere live on BBC Four's Storyville at 10pm GMT on 8 March, International Women's Day. It documents interviews of the family of the rape victims, rapists, including one of the six convicts in Nirbhaya gangrape and murder and the lawyers who defended them. In India, NDTV 24x7 will broadcast it live at 9 pm IST.
The British filmmaker Leslee Udwin stayed in India for two years for her documentary and spent 30 hours interviewing rapists in jail, seeking their perception towards the status of women in India. The replies she got shocked her out of her wits.
Among several rape accused, she interviewed 34-year-old Gaurav, who is serving his 10-year term in jail for raping a 5-year-old girl.
"He told me in minute detail what he had done. How he had taken off her knickers. How her eyes were wide with fear. How he had done it front and back. I asked him how tall she was. He stood up and put his hand above his knee. I asked him, 'How could you do something so terrible that would ruin a child's life?' He said, 'She was a beggar girl, her life was of no value.'" The Guardian quoted Udwin as saying.
However, Nirbhaya's rapist Mukesh Singh holds the most shocking opinion about women going out late at night and drinking alcohol. Talking about the rape of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in Delhi, Singh said she would have lived had she allowed them to rape her silently.
"You can't clap with one hand – it takes two. A decent girl won't roam around at night. A girl is more responsible for rape than a boy... only about 20% girls are 'good'," Singh told Udwin during the interview.
"She should have been silent and allowed the rape. Then they would have dropped her off after 'doing her' and only hit the boy," he added and described how they finally threw her out of the moving bus.
"The 15 or 20 minutes of the incident, I was driving the bus. The girl was screaming, 'Help me, help me.' The juvenile accused put his hand in her and pulled out something. It was her intestines ... We dragged her to the front of the bus and threw her out."
These were the rape accused saying things not expected from a human being, but what the lawyer ML Sharma has to say about Indian women is even more shocking. "We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman," Sharma, who defended the culprits of Nirbhaya, said.
Nirbhaya (not her real name) was gangraped and brutally assaulted with iron rods in a moving bus, which she and her male friend had boarded around 8:30 pm in Delhi after watching a movie on 16 December 2012. Six people, including a 17-year-old boy, had brutally mutilated her body and beaten her friend before dumping their bodies on the road in South Delhi.
Other than India, BBC is broadcasting this documentary in six other countries including Switzerland, Norway and Canada. On the day after the premiere, i.e. 9 March, actresses Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep will attend a screening of India's Daughter in New York, launching a worldwide campaign against gender inequality and sexual violence against women.
