India blocks BBC documentary on Modi in the country
INDIA has blocked the airing of a BBC documentary which questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying that even sharing of any clips via social media is barred.
Directions to block the clips from being shared have been issued using emergency powers available to the government under the country’s information technology rules, said Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the government, on his Twitter handle on Saturday (21).
While the BBC has not aired the documentary in India, the video was uploaded on some YouTube channels, Gupta said.
The government has issued orders to Twitter to block over 50 tweets linking to the video of the documentary and YouTube has been instructed to block any uploads of the video, Gupta said. Both YouTube and Twitter have complied with the directions, he added.
Modi was the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat when it was gripped by communal riots that left more than 1,000 people dead, by government count - most of them Muslims. The violence erupted after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire, killing 59.
Human rights activists estimate at least double that number died in the rioting.
Modi denied accusations that he failed to stop the rioting. A special investigation team appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the role of Modi and others in the violence said in a 541-page report in 2012 it could find no evidence to prosecute the then chief minister.
Modi was named the candidate for prime minister of his party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, in 2013 and led it to power in general elections in 2014 and then in 2019.
Last week, a spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry termed the BBC documentary a ‘propaganda piece’ meant to push a ‘discredited narrative’.
Petition demands independent probe
A new online petition has demanded an independent probe into a ‘serious breach’ by the BBC in its duties as a public broadcaster in the UK over the controversial documentary series on Modi.
‘Call for an Independent Investigation into the BBC over Modi documentary’ on Change. Org, which ‘strongly’ condemns the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for failing to meet the ‘highest standards of editorial impartiality’, has attracted over 2,500 signatures since it went online on Sunday night.
The petition labels ‘India: The Modi Question’, the first part of which aired last week and the second is due to be aired on Tuesday, as a piece of ‘sinister propaganda journalism that deliberately misinforms its viewers’.
‘We strongly condemn the BBC for failing to meet the highest standards of editorial impartiality in its two-part documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’,’ it reads.
‘We call upon the BBC Board to conduct an independent investigation into this serious breach of its duties as a public service broadcaster and publish the findings in full,’ it demands.
The petition also urges the UK’s independent media watchdog – the Office of Communications (OFCOM) – to hold the BBC to account for what it calls ‘repeated failures to secure content standards which command the trust of license-fee paying audiences’ and to discuss necessary corrections and clarifications with the broadcaster.
Under the rationale for the latest move, the organisers of the petition claim the documentary is an ‘example of agenda-driven reporting and institutional bias that now characterises this once globally respected organisation’.
‘The timing for airing, some 21 years later, a so-called investigative report that has nothing new in it, but only shoehorns old allegations to fit the producers clearly predetermined conclusions in itself speaks volumes. Inexplicably, it comes at a time when India’s Supreme Court has, after a lengthy investigation and due process, completely absolved Prime Minister Modi from the very same allegations of complicity in the 2002 riots that the BBC now seeks to rake up after more than two decades,’ it reads.
Many of the signatories also express similar sentiments, calling it ‘complete propaganda’ and condemning the BBC for carrying out a ‘malicious agenda’.
‘BBC is creating a false narrative against the two-times democratically elected Prime Minister of the largest democracy in the world. Besides PM Modi was exonerated by the Supreme Court of India,’ writes Lord Rami Ranger, one of the British Indian signatories who has been very vocal over the issue.
It comes as the Hindu Forum of Britain (HFB) wrote to Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, last week to complain against the broadcaster’s ‘anti-Hindu bias’.
‘This preposterous ill-advised production and airing of a Hindu hate piece could well be the ammunition thugs need to go out and target Hindus. Does the BBC not have any responsibility,’ its letter questions.
It follows the Indian government’s strong condemnation of the programme as a ‘propaganda piece’ lacking objectivity.
The BBC has defended the series as ‘rigorously researched according to the highest editorial standards’.