BBC versus BJP

Those Sri Lankans kowtowing with devotion on all fours before Indian leaders and bureaucrats, we hope would take note of the sudden raids by the Indian Inland Revenue Department on offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Mumbai and New Delhi.

The Inland Revenue Department searches took place weeks after the BBC telecast a documentary in the United Kingdom that projected the image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi not in a favourable light. It made the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Gaurav Bhatia call the BBC, ‘the most corrupt organisation in the world... India is a country that gives an opportunity to every corrupt organisation as long as you don’t spill venom’.

This columnist regularly watches the BBC World Service which is the same channel that broadcast over India. This BBC channel, we even considered to be more Indian than British given the deep understanding shown by the BBC to

India, its people and culture in its programmes and even advertisements. Perhaps the potentialities of a market of a billion people, India being the country with the largest number of English speakers, the claim of being the ‘Biggest democracy in the world’ and now the British Prime Minister being of Indian origin, were factors determining BBC preference in focusing on India over all other former colonies of the British Empire.

But democratic India is changing. The language used by BJP spokesman Gaurav Bhatia is not that of Mahatma Gandhi and was devoid of the intellectual flourishes of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Are new Indian Maharajas with supreme powers that brook no criticism within the ‘Biggest Democracy’ emerging?

The BBC and the BJP are likely to settle their dispute amicably.

But for neighbouring small countries like Sri Lanka such arrogant rhetorical flourishes are frightening.