Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi awaits the arrival of Indian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at his home in Hyderabad, New Delhi on Wednesday.
Manish Swarup/AP
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi awaits the arrival of Indian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at his home in Hyderabad, New Delhi on Wednesday.
Manish Swarup/AP
NEW DELHI – Days after India blocked a BBC documentary examining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots and banned people from streaming it online, authorities are moving to stop showing the program at colleges and universities and restrict clips of it. Critics criticized this action on social networks as an attack on press freedom.
Tensions rose in the capital New Delhi on Wednesday at Jamia Millia University, where a group of students said they planned to screen a banned documentary, prompting dozens of police officers armed with tear gas and riot gear to gather outside the campus gates.
Police, some in plainclothes, clashed with protesting students, arresting at least half a dozen people and taking them away in vans.
“Now is the time for the youth of India to speak the truth that everyone knows. We know what the prime minister is doing to society,” said 20-year-old Liya Shareef, a geography student and member of the Brotherhood’s student group.
Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital cut power and internet on campus on Tuesday ahead of the screening of a documentary by the student union. Authorities said it would disturb the peace on campus, but students watched the documentary on their laptops and cellphones after sharing it on messaging services like Telegram and WhatsApp.
The documentary has also created a storm in other Indian universities.
Authorities at Hyderabad University in southern India launched an investigation earlier this week after a group of students screened a banned documentary. In southern Kerala, workers of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party staged protests on Tuesday after some student groups affiliated with rival political parties defied the ban and filtered the curriculum.
The two-part documentary “India: The Modi Challenge” was not aired by the BBC in India, but India’s federal government blocked it over the weekend, barring people from sharing clips on social media using emergency powers under its information technology laws. . Twitter and YouTube complied and removed many links to the documentary.
The first episode of the programme, broadcast last week by the BBC for British audiences, brings to life the most controversial episode of Modi’s political career in 2002, when he became chief minister of the western state of Gujarat. It focuses on anti-Muslim riots. More than 1000 people were killed.
The riots have long dogged Modi amid accusations that his leadership allowed and even encouraged the bloodshed. Modi has denied the charges and said the Supreme Court found no evidence to prosecute him. Last year, the country’s top court rejected a petition by a Muslim victim who demanded Modi’s acquittal.
The first episode of the BBC documentary is based on interviews with victims of the riots, journalists and human rights activists, who say Modi looked the other way during the riots. It referred for the first time to a secret British diplomatic inquiry which concluded that Modi was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity”.
The documentary includes testimony from then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said a British inquiry found that Indian nationalist violence was aimed at “cleansing Muslims in Indian areas” and had “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”.
Suspicions of Modi’s quiet support for the riots led to the US, UK and EU denying him a visa, which was later reversed.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs last week called the documentary a “propaganda piece to promote a discredited narrative” that lacked objectivity and criticized it for “one-sidedness” and “persistent colonialism”. Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser to the government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, accused it of being an “anti-Indian taunt”.
The BBC said in a statement that the documentary was “rigorously researched” and included a wide range of voices and opinions.
“We offered the Indian government the right to respond to the series of questions – which it refused to do,” it said.
The second part of the documentary, which aired in the UK on Tuesday, “looks at the record of Narendra Modi’s government after his re-election in 2019,” according to the film’s description on the BBC’s website.
Students watch security guards as they guard the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, on Wednesday. A group of students said they planned to show a banned documentary examining Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots, prompting dozens of police officers armed with tear gas and riot police to gather outside campus gates.
Manish Swarup/AP
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Manish Swarup/AP
Students watch security guards as they guard the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, on Wednesday. A group of students said they planned to show a banned documentary examining Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots, prompting dozens of police officers armed with tear gas and riot police to gather outside campus gates.
Manish Swarup/AP
In recent years, India’s Muslim minority has become the target of violence by Hindu nationalists, emboldened by a prime minister who has remained silent on such attacks since his first election in 2014.
The ban sparked a wave of criticism from opposition parties and human rights organizations, who called it an attack on press freedom. It also drew more attention to the documentary, prompting dozens of social media users to share the clips on WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.
“You can ban, you can suppress the press, you can control institutions… but the truth is the truth. He has a bad habit of going out,” party leader Rahul Gandhi told reporters. Opposition from Congress. press conference on Tuesday.
Trinamool Congress lawmaker Mahua Moitra on Tuesday tweeted a new link to the documentary after the previous one was removed. “Good, bad or ugly – we decide. The government will not tell us what to watch,” Moitra said in his tweet, which was still live on Wednesday morning.
Human Rights Watch said the ban reflected a crackdown on minorities under the Modi government, with rights groups often using draconian laws to silence critics.
Critics say press freedom in India has declined in recent years, with the country falling 8 places to 150 out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. He accuses the Modi government of silencing critics on social media, particularly Twitter, a charge denied by senior ruling party leaders.
The Modi government has regularly lobbied Twitter to limit or ban content critical of the prime minister or his party. Last year, he threatened to arrest Twitter staff in the country for refusing to ban accounts run by critics after new rules were introduced for the tech and social media companies.
The ban on the BBC documentary follows a government proposal to give the Press Information Center and other “fact-checking” agencies the power to remove information deemed “false or untrue” from digital platforms.
The Editors Guild of India urged the government to withdraw the proposal, saying such a change would amount to censorship.
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