Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi awaits the arrival of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Wednesday at the Hyderabad home, in New Delhi, India.
Manish Swarup/AP
hide captions
switch captions
Manish Swarup/AP
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi awaits the arrival of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Wednesday at the Hyderabad home, in New Delhi, India.
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 sharing it online, authorities is scrambling to stop showing the show at colleges and universities and restrict clips of it on social media, a move that has been criticized by critics as an attack on self-righteousness. by the press.
Tensions escalated in the capital, New Delhi, on Wednesday at Jamia Millia University, where a group of students said they planned to screen the banned documentary, leaving dozens of policemen armed with tear gas and equipment rioters gathered outside the school gate.
Police, some in plain clothes, scuffled with student protesters and arrested at least half a dozen, who were taken away in a van.
“This is the time for young Indians to bring out the truth that everyone knows. We know what the prime minister is doing for society,” said Liya Shareef, 20, a geography student and member of the Phong student group. fraternal movement, said.
Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital cut off electricity and internet on its campus on Tuesday before the documentary was scheduled to be screened by the student union. Authorities said it would cause disorder on campus, but students still watched the documentary on their laptops and mobile phones after sharing it on messaging services like Telegram and WhatsApp.
The documentary has also taken the country by storm at other Indian universities.
Authorities at the University of Hyderabad, in southern India, began an investigation after a group of students showed the banned documentary earlier this week. In the southern state of Kerala, workers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party staged protests on Tuesday after several student groups affiliated with rival political parties defied the ban and screened the program. .
The two-part documentary “India: The Question of Modi” has not yet been broadcast in India by the BBC, but the Indian federal government blocked it over the weekend and banned people from sharing the clip on social media. , citing emergency powers under the country’s information technology law. Twitter and YouTube complied with the request and removed many links to the documentary.
The first season of the show, which was released by the BBC last week to a UK audience, revives the most controversial period of Modi’s political career when he was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002. This section focuses on anti-Muslim riots in which more than 1,000 people were killed.
Riots have long hunted Modi over allegations that the government under his supervision has allowed and even encouraged bloodshed. Modi has denied the charges and the Supreme Court said it found no evidence to indict him. Last year, the country’s top court rejected a petition by a Muslim victim questioning Modi’s whitewash.
The first season of the BBC documentary is based on interviews with riot victims, journalists and human rights activists who say Modi turned a blind eye during the riots. For the first time, it cited a secret British diplomatic investigation that concluded Mr Modi was “directly responsible” for the “atmosphere of impunity”.
The documentary includes testimony from then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said the British investigation revealed violence by Hindu nationalists to “purge Muslims from area is Hindu” and it has all the “signs of an ethnic cleansing.”
Suspicions that Modi was quietly supporting the riots led the US, UK and EU to deny him visas, a move that has since been reversed.
India’s foreign ministry last week called the documentary “a piece of propaganda designed to promote a particularly discredited story” that lacks objectivity, and criticized the film as “biased”. and “ongoing colonial thinking”. Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser to the government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced it as “anti-India trash.”
The BBC in a statement said the documentary had been “well researched” and attracted a wide range of voices and opinions.
“We have asked the Government of India to have the right to respond to the issues raised in this series – they have refused to respond,” the statement said.
The second season of the documentary, which was released on Tuesday in the UK, “reviews the performance of the Narendra Modi government following his re-election in 2019,” according to the film’s description on the page. BBC web.
Students monitor security personnel guarding the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia university on Wednesday in New Delhi, India. 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, which left dozens of police armed with tear gas. and riot gear gathered outside the school gates.
Manish Swarup/AP
hide captions
switch captions
Manish Swarup/AP
Students monitor security personnel guarding the main gate of Jamia Millia Islamia university on Wednesday in New Delhi, India. 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, which left dozens of police armed with tear gas. and riot gear gathered outside the school gates.
Manish Swarup/AP
In recent years, India’s Muslim minority has suffered violence from Hindu nationalists, encouraged by a prime minister who has remained largely silent on attacks. such a feat since he was first elected in 2014.
The ban has sparked a wave of criticism from opposition parties and human rights groups that see it as an attack against press freedom. It also drew more attention to the documentary, attracting a lot of social media users to share the clip on WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.
“You can ban, you can suppress the press, you can control the institutions… but truth is truth. It has the nasty habit of being public,” said Rahul Gandhi, leader of the National Party. great opposition, told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.
Mahua Moitra, a lawmaker from the Trinamool Congress political party, on Tuesday tweeted a new link to the documentary after the previous link was taken down. “Good, bad or bad – we decide. The government doesn’t tell us what to see,” Moitra said in her tweet, still early on Wednesday morning.
Human Rights Watch said the ban reflected a broader crackdown on minorities under the Modi government, which the human rights group said has frequently invoked draconian laws to silence those criticism.
Critics say press freedom in India has declined in recent years, and the country has dropped eight places to 150 out of 180 countries in last year’s Press Freedom Index compiled by the Reporters Organisation. No Borders published. It accused Mr. Modi’s government of silencing criticism on social media, especially on Twitter, an allegation that senior leaders of the ruling party have denied.
Mr. Modi’s government regularly pressures 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 their refusal to ban accounts run by critics after implementing new regulations for tech and social media companies.
The ban on the BBC documentary comes after the government proposed to empower the Press Information Bureau and other “fact-checking” agencies to take down news deemed “fake”. or untrue” from digital platforms.
The Editors’ Association of India called on the government to withdraw the proposal, saying such a change would be tantamount to censorship.
