India’s bar council has been meeting to decide what action to take against two lawyers who made derogatory and hate-filled statements about women in the BBC documentary India’s Daughters.
A women’s rights organization has also lodged a police complaint demanding prosecution of the lawyers, who represent four men who are on death row after being convicted of the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi in 2012.
India’s Daughters — a film about the gang rape — has been banned in India, and police are separately pursuing an investigation against British filmmaker Leslee Udwin, who has left the country, and her Indian crew.
The Indian government has remained defiant over its ban, despite a groundswell of acclaim for the film from prominent Indians who have watched it online.
The misogynist statements by M.L. Sharma and A.K. Singh, the two defense lawyers, were broadcast on the NDTV channel before the film was banned.
In the film, Sharma said there was no place for women in Indian society, while Singh declared that, as a Rajput, a member of a patrilineal clan, he would think nothing of burning his “unmarried daughter or sister … if they behaved improperly.”
Sharma and Singh featured in the NDTV Dialogues show on Thursday night along with the chairman of the bar council, a statutory body with the power to cancel a lawyer’s license.
The lawyers remained unapologetic, even defiant. Singh maintained that his critics were “prejudiced” and said he had received many calls of support.
Sharma declared: “I have committed no crime.” He alleged that Udwin had misrepresented him by using only part of what he said.
“She took my interview for 10 days, showed only one line,” he said.
Sharma has alleged that Udwin broke the law when she interviewed his client Mukesh Singh — who drove the bus on which the woman was raped and murdered — in Delhi’s Tihar jail.
Sharma told the Hindustan Times that, although his client’s consent for the interview was dated on Oct. 7, 2013, Udwin did her first interview with him a month earlier, before the court pronounced sentence in the case.
Indian law only allows prisoners who are on trial to be interviewed by journalists with the consent of the court. Jail officers do not have the authority to permit such interactions.
Sharma pointed out that, in the first interview with his client, which features five-and-a-half minutes into the film, Mukesh Singh is dressed casually in a black and white checked shirt.
“Under-trials do not wear uniforms, but, as soon as the conviction happens, the prisoner is mandatorily clad in the prison uniform,” Sharma said.
In the film, Mukesh Singh blamed the victim, saying she should not have been out at night and should not have fought back. He told Udwin: “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.”
Police officers are continuing their efforts to collect all of the film’s footage by visiting the homes and offices of Indian crew members.
Police failed to prevent Udwin from leaving India before they could question her, but on Friday claimed that the Indian executive producer of the film would “join the investigation.”
Separately, several thousand people broke into a high-security prison in the northeastern state of Nagaland late on Thursday and killed a man accused of rape, in the latest example of an outpouring of anger against sexual violence in India. Reuters reported that several people were injured when police fired on the protesters.
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