India’s ban on an unflattering BBC documentary on Prime Minister Modi sparks resistance and illegal screenings

Tensions in the capital New Delhi escalated on Wednesday at Jamia Millia University, where a student group said they planned to screen the banned documentary, prompting dozens of police officers equipped with tear gas and riot gear to gather at the gates of the to gather on campus.

Police, some in plain clothes, tussled with protesting students and arrested at least half a dozen, who were taken away in a van.

“This is the time for Indian youth to spread the truth that everyone knows. We know what the prime minister is doing to society,” said Liya Shareef, 20, a geography student and member of the Fraternity Movement student group.

Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital shut down power and the internet on its campus on Tuesday before the documentary was due to be screened by a student association. Authorities said it was disrupting peace on campus, but students still watched the documentary on their laptops and cellphones after sharing it through messaging services like Telegram and WhatsApp.

The documentary has also caused a stir at other Indian universities.

Authorities at the University of Hyderabad in southern India launched an investigation after a group of students screened the banned documentary earlier this week. In the southern state of Kerala, workers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party demonstrated Tuesday after some student groups belonging to rival political parties defied the ban and reviewed the program.

The two-part documentary India: The Modi Question was not broadcast by the BBC in India, but the Indian government blocked it over the weekend, banning people from sharing clips on social media and invoking emergency powers under its information technology laws. Twitter and YouTube complied and removed many links to the documentation.

The first part of the programme, released to UK audiences by the BBC last week, relives the most controversial episode of Modi’s political career when he was Prime Minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002. He focuses on anti-Muslim riots in which more than 1,000 people have been killed.

The riots have long dogged Modi over allegations that the authorities under his watch allowed and even encouraged the bloodshed. Modi has denied the allegations and the Supreme Court has said it found no evidence to prosecute him. Last year, the country’s top court rejected a petition by a Muslim victim questioning Modi’s exoneration.

The first part of the BBC documentary draws on interviews with riot victims, journalists and rights activists who say Modi looked the other way during the riots. It cites for the first time a secret British diplomatic inquiry which concluded that Modi was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity”.

The documentary includes the testimony of then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who says the British inquiry found that violence by Hindu nationalists was aimed at “cleansing Muslims from Hindu areas” and that it exhibited “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”.

Suspicions that Modi had been tacitly supporting the unrest prompted the US, Britain and the EU to refuse him a visa, a move that has since been reversed.

India’s Foreign Ministry last week called the documentary a “propaganda piece that aims to advance a particularly discredited narrative” that lacks objectivity, and criticized it for “bias” and “a persistent colonial mindset.” Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser at the government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced it as “anti-India junk.”

The BBC said in a statement the documentary had been “rigorously researched” and included a wide range of voices and opinions.

“We have offered the Indian government the right to respond to the matters raised in the series – they declined to respond,” the statement said.

The second part of the documentary, released in the UK on Tuesday, “examines the track record of Narendra Modi’s government following his re-election in 2019,” according to the film’s description on the BBC website.

In recent years, India’s Muslim minority has been the victim of violence by Hindu nationalists, encouraged by a prime minister who has largely remained silent on such attacks since his first election in 2014.

The ban has sparked a wave of criticism from opposition parties and right-wing groups, who have criticized it as an attack on press freedom. It also drew more attention to the documentary, prompting numerous social media users to share clips on WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.

“You can ban, you can suppress the press, you can control the institutions… but the truth is the truth. It has a nasty habit of coming out,” Rahul Gandhi, a leader of the opposition Congress Party, told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.

Mahua Moitra, a lawmaker with the Trinamool Congress political party, tweeted a new link to the documentary on Tuesday after a previous one was removed. “Good, bad or ugly – we decide. The government doesn’t tell us what to watch,” Moitra said in her tweet, which was still online as of Wednesday morning.

Human Rights Watch said the ban reflected a broader crackdown on minorities under the Modi government, which the human rights group said often invoked draconian laws to silence criticism.

Critics say press freedom in India has declined in recent years, with the country falling eight places to 150th out of 180 countries in last year’s Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. She accuses Modi’s government of silencing criticism on social media, particularly Twitter, an accusation senior leaders of the ruling party have denied.

The Modi government has regularly pressured Twitter to restrict or ban content it deems critical of the prime minister or his party. Last year it threatened to arrest Twitter employees in the country for refusing to ban accounts run by critics after sweeping new regulations for tech and social media companies.

The ban on the BBC documentary comes after a government proposal to give its press information office and other “fact-checking” agencies the power to remove news deemed “fake or false” from digital platforms.

The Editors Guild of India called on the government to withdraw the proposal as such a change would amount to censorship.