Valentin Hénault’s new memoir matters not because one foreign filmmaker had a bad experience in India, but because his story collides head-on with the image India has carefully sold to the world: a rising power of spirituality, democracy, innovation and civilisational confidence. Hénault’s account, now published in French as J’avais un rêve indien. Dans l’enfer de la prison de Gorakhpur, says that what began as a documentary journey on violence against Dalit women ended in arrest, a month in Gorakhpur jail and months of bureaucratic limbo before he could finally leave India. Le Monde reported in 2024 that he had travelled to document atrocities against Dalit women, attended a Dalit-led march in Gorakhpur on 10 October 2023, was accused of violating visa conditions, jailed for a month, then trapped for months by a look-out circular even after bail. Indian outlets, including The Print and The Wire, have since reported the memoir’s release and repeated the broad outline of that ordeal.
That distinction is important. A memoir is, by definition, a personal narrative, not a court judgment. But when a memoir’s central arc is corroborated by contemporaneous reporting in a major French newspaper and by later reporting in Indian media, it stops being easy to dismiss as literary exaggeration. The real question then becomes larger than Hénault himself: why does a story about Dalit women, caste humiliation and prison abuse sound so plausible in today’s India?
The answer begins with caste. Human Rights Watch said in its 2025 country chapter on India that Dalits continued to face “systemic violence and caste-based discrimination.” Specifically, it noted that Dalit women and girls remain at heightened risk of sexual violence. Official Indian data points in the same direction. NCRB data for 2023, as reported from official releases and parliamentary references, showed 57,789 registered cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes, with Uttar Pradesh alone accounting for 15,130 of them.
The account of prison also sits inside a documented structural problem. India’s prison system remains severely overcrowded. The NCRB’s 2023 prison statistics, as reflected in official and court-cited reports, put national prison occupancy at 120.8%, with undertrials accounting for about 73.5% of inmates. The Ministry of Home Affairs itself acknowledged in a 2025 release that continuous use of legal provisions for the release of eligible undertrials could reduce long detention and help address overcrowding. In other words, the Indian state does not dispute that undertrial incarceration and prison congestion are serious problems; it is already issuing advisories because the crisis is real. When Hénault writes about sleeping without space, filth, untreated suffering and a prison packed beyond dignity, he is describing an extreme experience inside a system whose underlying stress is officially acknowledged.
Soft power is not built on yoga diplomacy and moon missions alone. It also depends on whether a country appears fair, predictable, and safe to engage with.
There is another reason the story has resonance: minorities in India increasingly experience the law not as a neutral shield but as an unequal instrument. USCIRF’s 2025 annual report said religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate in 2024, citing rising attacks and discrimination against minorities, hateful rhetoric, arbitrary detentions and the use of laws to pressure civil society and journalists. Human Rights Watch similarly documented harassment of religious minorities, especially Christians from Dalit and Adivasi communities, alongside the continued targeting of activists on politically motivated charges.
This is where the Hénault affair becomes bigger than human rights reportage. It becomes a question of governance, credibility and economics. India is not a marginal state content to live off coercion alone; it wants admiration, capital, tourists, supply chains, campuses, conferences and strategic trust. Brand Finance’s 2025 Global Soft Power Index placed India 30th globally and highlighted its strengths in culture, future growth potential, science and international influence. That is what the Indian investors and governments are encouraged to see: modern, spiritual, technologically ambitious and globally consequential. But soft power is not built on yoga diplomacy and moon missions alone. It also depends on whether a country appears fair, predictable, and safe to engage with.
That is why rule-of-law metrics matter commercially, not just morally. The World Justice Project’s 2025 Rule of Law Index ranked India 86th out of 143 countries, with explicit declines tied to shrinking civic freedoms, weaker checks and balances, and worsening fundamental-rights indicators. For a country seeking to market itself as both a democratic partner and a premier business destination, that is not abstract reputational damage. It affects boardroom calculations on regulatory predictability, judicial trust, media freedom, social stability, and the treatment of foreigners and locals caught in politically sensitive situations. A country can attract investment despite rights concerns, but it cannot indefinitely separate its growth story from its governance story.
Hénault’s memoir therefore lands at an awkward moment for India’s international brand. It punctures the old exotic packaging through which many in the West once viewed India: sages, colour, transcendence and civilisational depth without sufficient attention to hierarchy, exclusion and brute state power. His own disillusionment is part of the story. But for India, the bigger problem is that its account is legible to the world because the supporting evidence is already there: caste brutality documented by rights groups and official crime data, and shrinking civic freedom recorded by independent watchdogs.
The writer is a freelance columnist