BBC And The Modi Question – OpEd

Over the past few weeks, the Indian government has launched an extraordinary campaign to stop its citizens from watching a new documentary by the British network that examines Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged involvement in a deadly riot in 2002 that resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, mostly of Muslims.

Invoking emergency powers, Indian authorities mandated the censorship of documentary snippets on social media sites like Twitter and YouTube. The Indian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman denounced the BBC broadcast as a “propaganda piece” created with a “colonial mindset.” According to a junior minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), watching the movie was “treason.”

The astounding actions taken by the government seemed to support a key claim made in the BBC series, which was that Modi, who came to national prominence in 2014 and was reelected in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist platform, was leading the world’s biggest democracy towards authoritarianism.

The incident should “draw greater attention,” according to Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director for the digital rights organization, to the “dangerous scenario” of deteriorating human freedoms in India. During times of national political upheaval, the government has been much more efficient and aggressive in its content-blocking practices.

The uproar got underway when the BBC broadcast the first of their two-part documentary series titled “India: The Modi Question” on January 17. The BBC emphasized the Indian leader’s early career and ascent via the powerful Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in the first hour-long episode. It centered on his time as the governor of Gujarat, a state that descended into unrest in 2002 when 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a train fire. The murders were attributed to Muslims, and in retaliation, Hindu mobs rampaged through Muslim neighborhoods. In its program, the BBC found British diplomatic documents from 2002 that compared Gujarat’s Muslims to an “ethnic cleansing” in their paroxysm of murder, rape, and house destruction. British authorities also concluded that the mob violence was foreseen by Hindu nationalist organizations operating with the state government’s protection and further stated that Modi was personally accountable for the atmosphere of impunity that allowed it to break out.

The movie made the diplomatic cables public for the first time, but it did not make any ground-breaking accusations against the Indian PM. Modi has faced criticism for allegedly allowing the riots to continue for two decades. In 2013, a panel of the Indian Supreme Court determined that there was not enough evidence to bring charges against Modi.

Due to his suspected involvement in the riots, the State Department refused Modi a U.S. visa in 2005; nonetheless, he was subsequently welcomed by U.S. administrations, who saw him as a key component of American foreign policy in Asia. Only Britain and not India broadcast the documentary, but the Modi administration responded immediately and vehemently.

Arindam Bagchi, a spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry, criticized the BBC for creating propaganda promoting a specific debunked theory. He charged the station with continuing to have a political agenda and a colonial mindset.

Kanchan Gupta, a ministry advisor in India, also said that the government had instructed to restrict all social media postings promoting the documentary by 2021 legislation. According to Gupta in a tweet, videos posting links to the BBC documentary and tweets disseminating hostile propaganda and anti-India rubbish from BBC World have been prohibited under the laws and regulations of India. He said Elon Musk’s recent acquisitions of Twitter and YouTube followed the directives.

The BBC said that their program was well-researched and that the Indian government refused to comment. Telegram, an encrypted messaging software, was the only platform Indians could use to distribute and view the movie, along with actual flash drives or cloud storage.

Despite the administration’s threats to postpone the event or risk sanctions, students showed up at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for a well-publicized 9 p.m. screening. However, the power was shut off 30 minutes before the appointed hour, and hundreds of students who had come to the student union were sent away. Instead of watching the documentary on a projector, they distributed URLs so that everyone could download it to their phones and see it together. A while afterward, students were assaulted by the youth wing of the RSS, a Hindu nationalist group, the university administration blamed a broken electrical wire for the power loss.

Student organizations had prepared to hold viewings throughout India, from West Bengal in the east to Kerala in the south. Administrators at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University halted any unapproved meetings after police arrested several students for preparing to show the video.

Dr. Sahibzada Muhammad Usman is a Research Scholar and Academic; Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Usman has participated in various national and international conferences and published 30 research articles in international journals.