Days after India blocked a BBC documentary examining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots and banned people from showing it online, authorities are scrambling to stop screenings of the program in colleges and universities and restricting clips from social media, a movement which has been decried by critics as an attack on the freedom of the press.
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 equipped with tear gas and riot gear to gather outside the campus gates.
Police, some in plainclothes, clashed with protesting students and detained at least half a dozen, who were taken away in vans.
“It’s time for Indian youth to assert the truth that everyone knows. We know what the prime minister has done to society,” said Liya Shareef, 20, a geography student and member of the Fraternity Movement student group.
Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital turned off power and internet on its campus on Tuesday before the documentary was scheduled to be screened by the student union. Authorities said it would disturb peace on campus, but students continued to watch the documentary on their laptops and cellphones after sharing it on messaging services such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
The documentary has also caused a storm in other Indian universities.
Authorities at the University of Hyderabad, in southern India, launched an investigation after a group of students showed a banned documentary earlier this week. In the southern state of Kerala, workers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party staged a demonstration on Tuesday after several student groups affiliated with rival political parties defied the ban and staged their programmes.
The two-part documentary “India: The Modi Question” has yet to be broadcast in India by the BBC, but India’s federal government blocked it over the weekend and banned people from sharing clips on social media, citing emergency powers under information technology laws. Twitter and YouTube complied with the request and removed many links to the documentary.
The first part of the program, released last week by the BBC for the British audience, revives the most controversial episode of Modi’s political career when he became the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002. It focuses on anti-Muslim riots in which more than 1,000 people died.
The riots have long dogged Modi over allegations that the authorities under his watch allowed and even encouraged the bloodshed. Modi denied the allegations, and the Supreme Court said it found no evidence to prosecute him. Last year, the country’s top court dismissed a petition filed by Muslim victims questioning Modi’s release.
The first part of the BBC documentary relies on interviews with riot victims, journalists and human rights activists, who say Modi looked the other way during the riots. It cited, for the first time, a secret British diplomatic inquiry that concluded Modi was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity”.
The documentary includes testimony from British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said a British investigation found that violence by Hindu nationalists aimed to “cleanse Muslims from Hindu areas” and had all the “characteristics of ethnic cleansing.”
Allegations that Modi was quietly encouraging the unrest prompted the US, UK and European Union to deny him visas, a move that has since been reversed.
India’s foreign ministry last week called the documentary a “propaganda piece designed to push a discredited narrative” that lacked objectivity, and slammed it for its “bias” and “persistent colonial mindset.” Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser at the government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced it as “anti-Indian garbage.”
The BBC in a statement said the documentary was “rigorously researched” and engaged with a range of voices and opinions.
“We have given the Indian government the right to respond to the matters raised in the series – not to respond,” the statement said.
The second part of the documentary, released Tuesday in the UK, “examines the track record of the Narendra Modi government after re-election in 2019,” according to the film’s description on the BBC website.
In recent years, India’s Muslim minority has seen violence from Hindu nationalists, fueled by a prime minister who has largely been oblivious to the attacks since he was first elected in 2014.
The ban sparked a wave of criticism from opposition parties and rights groups who slammed it as an attack on press freedom. It also drew more attention to the documentary, prompting many social media users to share the clip on WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.
“You can ban, you can suppress the press, you can control institutions… but the truth is the truth. It has bad habits,” Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party, told reporters at a press 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 one was removed. “Good, bad, or bad – we decide. The government does not tell us what to watch,” said Moitra in his tweet, which was still up on Wednesday morning.
Human Rights Watch said the ban reflected a wider crackdown on minorities under Modi’s government, which rights groups often called out the draconian legislation for criticism.
Critics say press freedom in India has declined in recent years and the country fell eight places, to 150 out of 180 countries, in last year’s Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. It has accused the Modi government of silencing critics on social media, particularly on Twitter, allegations that senior leaders of the ruling party have denied.
The Modi government has regularly pressured Twitter to restrict or ban content deemed 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 imposing new regulations on the tech and social media company.
The ban on the BBC documentary follows a government proposal to empower the Press Information Bureau and other “fact-checking” agencies to remove news it deems “fake or false” from the digital platform.
The Editors Guild of India urged the government to withdraw the proposal, saying the change would amount to censorship.