Singh made the comments in the new documentary India's Daughter, which screened Wednesday night on the BBC. In the 2012 attack, Singh and five other men lured a young woman onto a bus and then gang-raped her, violating her so brutally that she later died from her injuries.
The 2012 Delhi gang rape was a high-profile instance of the brutal sexual attacks that strike fear into Indian women — more recently, a woman in Rohtak was violently gang-raped and beaten to death by eight men. In a 2011 study, nearly one in four Indian men surveyed admitted to committing rape — by far the highest of any country included in the sample.
Sexual assault has become a flashpoint in a much deeper political dispute over the ways in which Indian culture is changing as the country becomes more urban and less traditional. A sort of culture war has emerged. One aspect of that war: sexual assault has at times become a weapon used to police Indian women's adherence to traditional social rules and, by extension, society's adherence to traditional values. That has come with disturbingly institutionalized victim-blaming that, along with impunity for perpetrators, allows a culture of sexual assault to flourish.
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