BBC documentary flouted laws, portrayed India poorly: Lekhi

The BBC documentary on the 2012 Delhi gangrape incident not only "kept open the wound" but also flouted laws by naming the victim, BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi today said as she lashed out at its makers for portraying India as a "rotten society" without proper laws.
Stating that a vibrant society would always come together to "fight a wrong", Lekhi said the documentary 'India's Daughters' attempted to portray this as a weakness.
"A wrong depiction was given about my country... The depiction was given as if we are some rotten society where all girls get raped regularly and we don't have even laws. We don't have an open press that doesn't publish those stories," she said.

The MP was speaking at a function organised here by a CII women's initiative, which hosted Afghanistan's first lady of Afghanistan, Rula Ghani.
"Very recently the entire ban against the documentary was sought to be created as a noise against my country. It was sought to be portrayed that we as a society do not like speaking about such causes, whereas the truth was something very different," she said.
Lekhi claimed that the documentary makers failed to honour their undertaking to authorities to furnish an unedited version before making it public and had advanced the date of its release.

"...As per my country's law you cannot name the victim but the name of the rape victim was disclosed in the documentary," Lekhi said.

The Parliamentarian further noted that the makers of the documentary had gone for "an international launch and started a campaign against India in the name of women's rights."
"We are all fighting atrocities against women," Lekhi said referring to the Afghan first lady's narration, at a conference at Jamia Milia University yesterday, of the lynching of a young Afghani women who spoke up against religious oppression.
Lekhi said she considers women as the "largest minority in the world" because they still did not command decision making positions be it "in Parliament or as company directors."
The MP said statistics, including those from the UN, pointed out that women all over the world be it from the developed, the developing or the underdeveloped suffered in the same way.

"Instead of using women rights as a political issue by the more developed nations against the less developed nations, it is better to use technology to curb the crimes and atrocities against women and discuss the issues," Lekhi said.