Free speech activists continued efforts to make available India’s Daughter on the Internet for the second day on Friday as demand grew more vocal for a revocation of the ban on the controversial documentary on the December 16, 2012 gang rape in Delhi.
Though the hour-long documentary, aired on BBC Four on Wednesday evening, could not be accessed on YouTube for much of the day, at least one URL (Uniform Resource Locator) provided it for watching in the evening.
On clicking the YouTube link to the video, the video-sharing site threw up a black screen for the most part of the day with a message, “This content is not available on this country domain due to a court order.”
Asked if the government had issued any new communication to pull down more URLs, a Google India source said: “There was no update.” The film was, however, accessible on other video-sharing websites as people found ways of circumventing the ban to share the film.
As more people managed to access the film, the clamour for revoking the ban grew, resulting in more endorsements for an online petition to the Union Home Minister to reverse the decision and “celebrate International Women’s Day (March 8) by shining a light on the problems our country faces, instead of shying away from them.”
The decision to ban the film, which the government said was part of an international conspiracy to defame India, drew world media attention with most leading media houses reporting on it or carrying editorials.
While an earlier article in The Guardian described the international conspiracy theory as bewildering since “the film reveals little that is new,” the U.K. newspaper carried a comment piece on Friday which said: “By going to the courts to stop it being shown, the Indian authorities reveal themselves to be unable — or unwilling — to grasp the connection between the two [the rape and the wider prejudices].”
