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NEW DELHI – The film was already banned, with social media posts censored. Now, without lights or electricity, students crowded around glowing smartphones to watch what their government had described as subversive foreign propaganda.
China? no You were in India, supposedly the world’s largest democracy, watching the BBC.
The Indian government launched an extraordinary campaign last week to prevent its citizens from watching a new documentary by British broadcaster investigating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in a deadly 2002 uprising that left more than 1,000 people – mostly Muslims – were killed.
Indian officials, invoking emergency powers, ordered clips from the documentary to be censored on social media platforms including YouTube and Twitter. The Foreign Office spokesman called the BBC production a “propaganda piece” made with “a colonial mindset”. A junior minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared that watching the film amounted to “treason.”
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On Tuesday night, authorities cut power to the student union hall at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawarharlal Nehru University to prevent the film from showing – a move that only provoked recalcitrant students across the country to hold more screenings.
When students from another college in the Indian capital – Jamia Millia Islamia University – announced their own plans to see the film on Wednesday, Delhi police rushed in to arrest the organizers. Rows of riot police armed with tear gas were also deployed to the campus, according to witnesses and smartphone photos they shared.
All in all, the government’s remarkable moves seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was slipping into authoritarianism under Modi, who came to national power in 2014 and was re-elected on a Hindu nationalist platform in 2019 .
Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia-Pacific policy director for digital rights group Access Now, said the episode should “pay more attention” to the “dangerous situation” of civil liberties undermining in India. The government has become “far more efficient and aggressive” in blocking content at moments of national political controversy, he said.
“How is it acceptable for India as a democracy to mandate such a large amount of web censorship in the country?” Chima said. “You have to view this incident as part of a cumulative wave of censorship.”
The controversy began on January 17 when the BBC aired the first part of its two-part documentary India: The Modi Question.
In the hour-long first segment, the BBC focused on the Indian leader’s early career and his rise through the influential Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It focused on his tenure as leader of Gujarat, a state that erupted in violence in 2002 after the killing of 59 Hindu pilgrims in a train fire. The killings were blamed on Muslim perpetrators, and Hindu mobs retaliated by rampaging through Muslim communities.
In its documentary, the BBC uncovered British diplomatic cables from 2002 that likened the spate of murder, rape and home demolitions to “ethnic cleansing” of Gujarat’s Muslims. British officials also concluded that the mob violence was preplanned by Hindu nationalist groups “under the protection of the state government” and went on to suggest Modi was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that led to its outbreak led, according to the documentary .
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While the film revealed the existence of the diplomatic cables for the first time, it made no groundbreaking allegations against the Indian leader. Modi faced criticism for two decades for allowing the unrest to rage on, and in 2013 a panel of India’s Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him.
In 2005, the State Department denied Modi a US visa for his alleged role in the riots – although he was later welcomed by successive US administrations, which saw him as the lynchpin of American foreign policy in Asia.
Modi has consistently denied any wrongdoing related to his handling of the 2002 events.
The documentary only aired in the UK and not India last week, but the Modi government’s response was swift and vigorous.
Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi lashed out at the BBC for “producing a propaganda article aimed at spreading a certain discredited narrative”. He accused the broadcaster of maintaining a political agenda and an “enduring colonial mindset”.
An adviser to India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Kanchan Gupta, also revealed that under a 2021 law, that ministry issued a policy to censor all social media posts sharing the documentary.
“Videos sharing hostile BBC World propaganda and anti-India garbage disguised as ‘documentary’ on YouTube and tweets sharing links to the BBC documentary have been blocked under India’s sovereign laws and rules,” Gupta said in a tweet. He added that both YouTube and Twitter, recently acquired by Elon Musk, have complied with the orders.
In a statement, the BBC said their documentary was “rigorously researched” and the Indian government declined to comment on the play.
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Until the weekend, Indians could only share the film on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, and view copies stored on cloud services or physical USB sticks.
On Tuesday night, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi rallied for a widely publicized 9pm screening, defying warnings from university administration to cancel the event or take disciplinary action. Hundreds of students flocked to the student union, only to be thwarted 30 minutes before the scheduled time when the power was cut, plunging the hall into darkness, said Anagha Pradeep, a graduate student in political science.
Instead of watching the documentary on a projector, they shared links to download the film to their phones and watch as a group, she said.
Shortly after, students were attacked by members of the youth wing of the Hindu nationalist RSS group, Pradeep said. According to local media, the university administration blamed a faulty power line for the power outage.
On Wednesday, student groups from Kerala in southern India to West Bengal in the east announced their plans to hold sightseeing tours. At Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi, administrators halted all unauthorized gatherings after police arrested several students for planning to screen the documentary, local outlets reported.
Aishe Ghosh, chair of the JNU student union, said the pushback from universities shows that India is “still breathing [as] a democracy.”
“What’s the problem if a lot of Indians see it?” Ghosh testified by phone Wednesday from a subway station where she was hiding to avoid arrest.
“They will see through the propaganda if it exists,” she said. “What we’re getting is more and more censorship.”