Freedom of expression in world’s largest democracy
In the world’s largest democracy, something is brewing that could have grave implications for freedom of expression.
In what seems like an expected slide, in 2022’s global press index ranking, India had found itself eight places lower than a year before, in the company of conflict-torn countries like Somalia and Libya.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which releases the annual ranking, specifically mentioned violence against journalists as one of the reasons that “demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in the world’s largest democracy.
” Recently, BBC made a documentary questioning Modi’s leadership as Chief Minister during riots in his home state of Gujrat in 2002.
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. Yes! They were in India, ostensibly the world’s largest democracy, and watching the BBC.
India’s right-wing government has used emergency powers to block the airing of a BBC documentary which questions Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots when he was CM of Gujrat and a prominent member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s far-right ideological mentor founded in 1925 along the lines of the then European fascist parties.
Calling the two-part BBC film, India: The Modi Question, a “propaganda piece”, the Indian government ordered Twitter to take down more than 50 tweets linking to the documentary while YouTube was instructed to block any video uploads.
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.
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.
When students at another college in the Indian capital — Jamia Millia Islamia University — announced their own plans on Wednesday to view the film, Delhi police swooped in to detain the organizers.
Ranks of riot police armed with tear gas were also dispatched to the campus, according to witnesses and smartphone photos they shared.
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.
—The writer is contributing columnist based in Shahdadpur, Sindh
