News

Protests took place outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House yesterday over controversial Narendra Modi documentary India: The Modi Question.

Dozens of protesters from Britain’s Indian diaspora gathered outside the BBC HQ in London on Sunday, angered by the portrayal of the Indian leader and his relationship with the nation’s Muslim minority.

Meanwhile, Indian free speech activists are trying to have the film reinstated on social media after it was removed.

India’s Supreme Court will next week consider petitions against a government order to have clips of the show removed from Twitter and YouTube, Reuters reports. Two lawyers have taken out petitions against the move and they will be heard in the next few days.

The doc, which the BBC has defended as being “rigorously researched,” investigates persistent allegations that Modi’s government is unfavourable towards the country’s minority Muslim population.

The Indian government has taken...

Updated: Riot police have been called out and several students have been arrested at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university on Wednesday ahead of a planned screening of a controversial BBC documentary on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which is blocked in India.

The Indian government has used its emergency powers to block the documentary on social media.

Important

Videos sharing @BBCWorld hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage, disguised as ‘documentary’, on @YouTube and tweets sharing links to the BBC documentary have been blocked under India’s sovereign laws and rules.

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— Kanchan Gupta...

Twitter and YouTube took down a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, The Intercept reports. The censorship was in coordination with the government of India, as officials called for the social media platforms to take action against what they considered a “propaganda piece.”

Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, condemned the BBC documentary in a series of Twitter posts on Jan. 21, calling the film “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,...

Elon Musk’s Twitter has complied with an Indian government request to delete all links to a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to journalists and free speech advocates in the country.

The first half of the two-part documentary India: The Modi Question aired on BBC Two on Jan. 17. The series investigates the “persistent allegations” against Modi of fanning the flames of Hindu nationalism and prejudice against India’s large Muslim minority. In particular, the doc explores his role in the 2002 riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister at the time, which left over 1,000 dead, the majority of them Muslims.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Arindam Bagchi has called the documentary “a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative.”

In response, the BBC shared statements on social media saying that the film was “rigorously researched according to the highest editorial standards.