The widespread support for India’s Daughter, a documentary on the Delhi gangrape case of 2012, has made me want to defend India when I should be defending Jyoti Singh, the young medical student who died as a result of the attack. Perhaps that’s because the support for the documentary has come predominantly from my non-Indian friends, who I worry know little about India past the sensational headlines.

I, too, know very little about India, past the sensational headlines. On many levels, I’m just playing cultural tourism with my heritage, except, as an Indian-American, I’ve become a self-appointed ambassador for the country from which I hail. The pressure to constantly live up to the model minority stereotype – and not the Slumdog Millionaire stereotype – can be exhausting.

I was shattered when the story of Singh’s rape first broke. The crime was horrific and it deserved the international condemnation it received. But for Indians, even including first-generation Indian-Americans like myself, there was an even worse feeling: the lack of surprise. My enchantment with India couldn’t completely obscure its realities.

The brutality of the rape may have been an outlier, but the crime itself wasn’t that shocking. For all the progressive strides India had been making, the rape of Jyoti Singh is a painful reminder that the country still has a long way to go when it comes to protecting women.

But India’s citizens condemned the attacks en masse. The six attackers were arrested within days, and a fast-tracked trial found the assailants all guilty and charged with the death penalty less than a year after the crime was committed. Judicial reform for later rape cases following shortly after. It was a speedy result rarely seen even in Western countries.

That victory was poignant for me as an Indian-American, struggling to defend a contentious homeland. After decades of building up model minority goodwill in America, my people had just started to really make it. At the same time that America was serving a light sentence on its own gang rapists in Steubenville, my homeland had laid down the gauntlet for how to prosecute rape cases. From that perspective, India’s Daughter, which addresses the social pressure that led to swift governmental action, feels like it should have been celebratory.

But it isn’t. The opening scenes of the film, widely shared on YouTube, ensure that immediately. Grainy footage of the bus, and home movies of Singh as a child, all remind you that the reason there was any speedy resolution was because a crime so violent that it could not be ignored.

The chilling reminder midway through the film, that 250 members of Parliament have been accused of rape, shows that the political leaders of the country are complicit in perpetuating India’s rape culture. India’s banning of the film betrays how quickly the country can regress to its conservative norms.

Those who have lived in India are absolutely right to “take a hard line” against the nation as a whole. Still, I feel uncomfortable being one of those critics. As much as being Indian is my identity, India isn’t. It’s my exoticized homeland, and my expectations for it are set at a bar higher than reality can meet.

I realize my desire to portray India in a romanticized glow isn’t so much a reflection of wanting to protect it from westerners rubbernecking our tragedies, as it is an attempt to justify to myself the pedestal on which I’ve placed India. But the pedestal is ultimately a fallacy, and conflating pride in my heritage with an obligation to defend India is a false mission.

I wear my heritage like a badge, because as a model minority, it’s what keeps me from completely assimilating into American culture. But without tough critics, films like India’s Daughter, and even Indians like myself speaking out repeatedly, India won’t change. Exoticizing it from afar isn’t helping India in the short or long run. It’s just burying our heads in the sand.