Narendra Modi greets his supporters in New Delhi, January 16, 2023. SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP
This could refresh ties between London and New Delhi. The Indian government announced on Saturday January 21 that it had blocked videos and tweets sharing a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in community unrest, calling it “propaganda”.
The documentary, titled India: The Modi Question, claims the prime minister, then head of state of Gujarat, ordered police to turn a blind eye to serious violence in 2002 that left at least a thousand dead, most of them members of the Muslim minority close. The program was not broadcast in India, the world’s most populous democracy.
Twitter was also ordered to block more than 50 posts with links to videos of the documentary hosted on YouTube. The two companies, which did not comment on Sunday, have complied with the instructions, government adviser Kanchan Gupta said. However, some tweets still showed excerpts on Sunday.
Approved report
Gupta, who said the scheme could damage India’s “friendly ties” abroad, said several ministers reviewed the documentary and said it called into question the credibility of India’s Supreme Court, which acquitted Mr Modi in 2012.
The 2002 riots began in Gujarat after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a fire on a train. Subsequently, 31 Muslims were convicted of criminal association and murder. The BBC documentary features a declassified UK Foreign Office report citing anonymous sources that Narendra Modi met with police officers to “order them not to intervene” during the anti-Muslim violence that followed the deaths of the pilgrims.
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This violence, perpetrated by far-right Hindu groups, was “politically motivated” with the aim of “cleansing Muslims from Hindu areas,” the ministry report adds. This “systematic campaign of violence bears all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and “would not have been possible without the climate of impunity created by the state government (…). Narendra Modi is directly responsible,” the report concludes. Mr Modi, who led the state of Gujarat from 2001 until he was elected prime minister in 2014, was briefly banned from the United States over the violence.