India's Modi doesn't want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them.

Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question."

TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.”

In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” He said that both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered to block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “have complied with the directions.” Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary but whose posts were later removed and replaced with a legal notice.

...The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes known, occurred in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. A group of militants aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement, which encompasses Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly told police forces to stand down in the face of the ongoing violence, which killed about 1,000 people.

“The documentary has unnerved Mr. Modi as he continues to evade accountability for his complicity in the violence,” Naik, the journalist, said. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his image internationally and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”

Of course, when the Indian government tells people not to watch the documentary, that's tremendous free advertising for it.

I haven't watched the documentary yet. It's difficult to find it online without paying for a subscription to some video/movie service. The best source I could find was the IslamiCity web site, which says it provides "a non-sectarian, comprehensive and holistic view of Islam and Muslims."

Part 1 of the documentary is here on that site. Part 2 of the documentary is here on that site.

The BBC is a respected organization, so my bet is that the documentary mostly, if not totally, tells the truth about the Gujarat violence and Modi's subsequent embracing of extreme Hindu nationalism. 

Courageous people in India are screening the documentary despite the government's threats against those who do this. It's really disturbing that police in riot gear were sent to a university in advance of a planned screening. 

If Modi thinks the documentary is untrue or unfair to him, he could have commented on it prior to its release, as the BBC requested. But he didn't do this, which indicates to me that Modi just doesn't like the truth being revealed about his role in the Gujarat killings.

This episode puts Modi, and India, in a bad light. A Washington Post story is scathing. Here's excerpts from "Censorship, arrests, power cuts. India scrambles to block BBC documentary."

NEW DELHI — The film had already been banned, the social media posts censored. Now, the students huddled without light or electricity around glowing smartphones to watch what their government had deemed to be subversive foreign propaganda.

China? No. They were in India, ostensibly the world’s largest democracy, and watching the BBC.

The Indian government over the past week has embarked on an extraordinary campaign to prevent its citizens from viewing a new documentary by the British broadcaster that explores Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in a deadly 2002 riot that saw more than 1,000 people — mostly Muslims — killed.

Indian officials, invoking emergency powers, ordered clips from the documentary to be censored on social media platforms including YouTube and Twitter. The Foreign Ministry spokesman lambasted the BBC production as a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” One junior minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared that watching the film amounted to “treason.”

On Tuesday evening, authorities cut electricity to the student union hall at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in an attempt to prevent the film being screened — a move that only provoked defiant students around the country to try to host more viewings.

...All told, the remarkable steps taken by the government seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was sliding into authoritarianism under Modi, who rose to national power in 2014 and won reelection in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist platform.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director of the digital rights group Access Now, said the episode should “give more attention” to the “dangerous situation” of eroding civil liberties in India. The government has become “far more efficient and aggressive” in blocking content during moments of national political controversy, he said.

“How is it acceptable for India, as a democracy, to be ordering such a large amount of web censorship in the country?” Chima said. “You have to look at this incident as part of a cumulative wave of censorship.”

Comments

[Kermit]

India needs a new Prime Minister. End of story.

[Mirror mirror]

The whole world is out of balance. When Bill Mahr is the moderate voice of reason, you know we’ve gone too far.

Modi is an extremist, so is Xi and Putin and Biden. Too far left, too far right… what ever happened to the middle ground?

What’s so terrible about being balanced??

America is FAT. We’re fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe other countries look at us and are actually terrified of becoming like us.

That said, America is still the most blessed and fortunate country on earth but it won’t last if we don’t develop the necessary amount of discipline to simply be balanced.

We really aren’t in a place to be pointing fingers at other countries when our educational, medical and financial institutions are on the brink of collapse.

We need to fix US.

[Appreciative Reader]

Biden isn't too "left", Mirror Mirror. Not by a long shot.

It isn't a question of left or right, at all. What's wrong with Trump, and the brain dead zombies that support him despite knowing what a turd he is, is not that he's conservative; it's that they support him despite the fact that he's crazy, that he's ignorant, that he's stupid (and yet wily enough, as far as low cunning, to string along a bunch of morons), that he's a dishonest hypocrite and grifter, that he's destructive of everything the US stands for.

Mirror, mirror, indeed. You find yourself apalled by what's happening in India? Rightly so; but what you fail to realize is that India is a standout case study of how years and decades of progress can be undone in a matter of a few years, and a reasonably sane country can regress back to jingoistic nationalism and supersition and fall prey to charlatanry pure and simple. The US has survived one term of Trump; but give it two, maybe tree terms of that grifter, or someone like him, and the US will be reduced to another India, in terms of the regress into superstition and irrationality.

The danger isn't the right and wrong divide. The danger is the sane and insane divide, the rational and irrational divide. Unfortunately far too many in the US are, or side with, the irrational and the regressive and the destructive; and the rest are, even now, complacent. Let every American with a single functioning gray cell in their brain stop supporting that unspeakable grifter Trump and everything he stands for; and let every right thinking man make sure to come out to vote for sanity and reason, rather than complacently and negligently coasting by without. India has little hope of return to sanity any time soon; but the US may yet save itself from following in their footsteps if people are mindful of the danger looming so very close by.

[Appreciative Reader]

Ah, typo. The first sentence of the last paragraph there should read, "The danger isn't the right and left divide."

I mean, sure, 'the right and wrong divide works as well', even if that does reverse the order in which the two 'sides' are mentioned, provided you don't mind the weird-sounding sentence construction. But not what I was going for there.

[um]

The effect of watching the whole documentary had and effect on my mind as if a bolder was dropped in too a calm pond.

It formed rings of ripples in the form of questions. Questions about what, who where, when and the why of the documentary, its content, the makers, the place were it was offered to the public.

Trying to find answers and writing some down here, made it all the more uncomfortable.

Globalization of information is like taking medicine with a heavy load of side effects. Sometimes it is better to accept the disease then to suffer the consequences of the cure.

[Jim Sutherland]

BBC is just another Propaganda Mocking Bird Main stream “ Lame Stream” channel that hates Modi, because Modi and Trump are good friends and support each other. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBS, CBS, ABC, GUARDIAN, are all Mocking Bird Echo chambers of talking heads spouting Fake news.
The U.K. Has a Muslim Prime Minister, and Muslims have taken over London, with their Muslim Mayor, Khan. It was the U.K. that partitioned Muslims and Hindus, forming Pakistan, breaking away from Mother India. The U.K. , now ruled by Muslim Politicians, have recruited BBC Propagandists who hate Trump , to use Modi , as their Boogy Man, to put Muslims in power in Mother India, who will obviously favor the U..K. once again.
Modi is up for re-election in 2024, so the Propagandists seek to bring him down, and out of power.
It won’t work. Modi will win agsain in 2024 by a Land slide. He is good for India.
Jim Sutherland

[um]

@ Jim

FYI:
https://muslimnews.co.uk/news/uk/uk-sunak-become-uks-first-ever-hindu-prime-minister/

[um]

@ Jim

FYI:
https://muslimnews.co.uk/news/uk/uk-sunak-become-uks-first-ever-hindu-prime-minister/

[Appreciative Reader]

facepalm

...And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of demographic that votes in the likes of Trump and Modi.

Unfortunately they're in large enough numbers, these morons, to pose a real threat. They've taken India down, beyond any chance of immediate redemption; and given half a chance they'll do the same to the US as well.

They're funny, these jokers. But the risk they pose is very real, and no laughing matter

[Appreciative Reader]

#facepalm

...And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of demographic that votes in the likes of Trump and Modi.

Unfortunately they're in large enough numbers, these morons, to pose a real threat. They've taken India down, beyond any chance of immediate redemption; and given half a chance they'll do the same to the US as well.

They're funny, these jokers. But the risk they pose is very real, and no laughing matter

[Jim Sutherland]

Whoops! Sorry I was wrong regarding the U.K. P.M. But does any one here think he could fill the largest Cricket Stadium and get a standing Ovation as Trump did when he was there? Or Biden?

[um]

@ Jim

There are so many things in India I cannot imagine ever to happen in the USA or any country in Europe.

An a full stadium with a standing ovation ... can also mean a bad, very bad omen.

Do not dabble in politics .... You must have heard it said.
It was a wise advice.

[Jim Sutherland]

To uninformed Trump and Modi haters, , educate yourselves just a few minutes to listen to what Gen.Flynn says that is really taking the U.S. and Russia to WEIII.
https://www.generalflynn.com/emergency-warning-of-nuclear-war-coming-domestic-false-flag/
JIM SUTHERLAND

[um]

@ Jim

For your sake I have gone through the video.

Do forgive me that I do not comment on what the General had to say.

But let me say this much:
Humanity has accepted the raise of multinationals, the construction of political unions after WW II and some time later the internet, the globalization of data and everything related to it.

Until the 2 great WW's the world was made up of regional, state powers, and regional cultures, without very much interaction.
If we look in the history of these countries we can find that the bigger a state is, the more controversies there are between ethnic groups and elements of power.
So those enormous states as there are Russia and China have always known an rather brutal totalitarian regime in order to manage, say control, these internal powers.

As I have often written here, we as individual human beings, are born with certain instincts to keep ourselves alive and the mechanisms to fight and to run depending the circumstances.

These natural, biological traits, mark whatever humans do. We only relax towards one another, lower our gards in the safety of our clans, tribes etc ...

We humans are not equipped for globalization.

It is simple, if I eat every day with the same people, there is little need for control but the more people are involved, and the further away from my table, the greater the need to set up systems of control.

So if the whole world has to be seen as just ONE region, and ruled according the principles humanity has developed centuries ago, then enormous control is needed for those rules to govern such an world state.

By now it is too late Jim, there is no deep state etc we have brought over ourselves ... we have allowed our own BABYLON to be born out of our for ever more and more ... thinking we could handle it.

We have been as arogant as the manager of an cart that started out with one horse and over time added more an more horses and has come to believe he can manage it.

He cannot control so many horses [different powers]

No Biden, No Trump none of these leaders is able to pacify the powers that the cultural bomb has released..

Humans can only develop their individuality to the fullest in a HERD or a PACK within the confines of an NATURAL territory they can handle.

They have, out of arrogance, eaten from the forbidden fruits, and are now thrown out of the regional EDENS.

I do hope my english is good enough to make you understand the gist of the idea.

[um]

And Jim ....

The indigenous people say do not disturb mother earth, unless you want her wrath to hit you.

Colonialism, is kind of disturbing too, of the natural order.

We are now paying the price ... for both

[Jim Sutherland]

@um,….I can’t disagree with any thing you said. It may be too late fir the U.S., but its way too late for Europe and the U.K. As for Gen. Flynn, I think he could be a decent President that might be able to at least delay Dooms Day WWIII. Trump has never wanted War either, and was, still us, a much better Negotiator than the Biden Administration.

Thanks for watching the Video.

[um]

@ Jim

You are welcome.

We have unleashed powers we cannot control.

Only saints, that have controlled the powers inside themselves, would be able to controll these powers outside themselves.

As they are not willing to do so, the fate of the earth, is in the hands of 5, 50 or some 20 rulers that are all but saints, individuals that are all victims of the powers inside themselves.... irrespective who they are ...in your case the Biden's, the Trump's or whoever.

They ALL, no one excluded ..suffer from
greed
attachment
anger
lust
and above all EGO

[Appreciative Reader]

This is ...unbelievable.

People go around building up a fantastic edifice made of sand, one of the basic foundations of which is the Muslim PM of UK, on which foundation stands the whole Islamophobic house of cards. And, when that very foundation is shown to be exactly the opposite of what they'd imagined, do they acknowledge that their edifice is faulty? No, they cursorily throw in a Whoops, execute an Olympics-worthy goal-shifting contortion and babble on about filling stadia, and go on to reference some madman. No fucking wonder that grifters like Trump and Modi get elected, when complete morons like these are allowed to vote.

And hilarious though all of this is, this is no laughing matter, because these jokes cumulatively add up to catastrophic consequences. True, both these "leaders", the one here and the one there, are completely ridiculous. True, their supporters are circus clowns, as evidenced right here. But the net result of it all is exactly the opposite of funny, as a certain ridiculous figure of fun with a toothbrush mustache showed us not that many decades ago.

As you say, um, the filling of stadiums can be a sinister thing, depending. We saw that plainly in Germany in the last century; we're starting to see it in India today; and we came close to seeing it in the US as well, although thankfully that grotesque demonstration was short-lived, for the moment.

The world's in a very precarious state. All it takes to send it all crashing down is not necessarily some uber supervillain, or some massive force of nature; a bunch of morons and jokers can end up writing our civilizational epitaph just as effectively.