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The many silences and problems in the BBC documentary on Modi
by AMUST
Professor Irfan Ahmad
On Tuesday 14 February 2023, the Income Tax officials raided the BBC India offices. Before the raid is hurriedly taken as a sign of BBC’s fullblown criticism of the Indian government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we must not ignore the many similarities between the recent two-part BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question, and the worldview of Modi. Against the uncritical celebration of the BBC documentary by many deemed critical of Modi, I show how it instead reproduces the ideology he and Indian/Hindu nationalism at large subscribe to. At the outset, let’s deal with the most likely objection to my argument: if the documentary partakes in the anti-Muslim ideology of Modi’s party, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), why did the government ban it?
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The Indian government described the documentary as reflecting the “continuing colonial mindset.” But what can be more comical than the fact the law banning the documentary is itself colonial. The Information Technology (IT) law used to impose the ban criminalizes contents that are deemed against “the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India” and “security of the State.” This law springs directly from the British colonial law: the 1919 Rowlatt Act, itself derived from the Defense of India Act of 1915. Both these laws criminalized activities defined as “a threat to the security of the state.”
Notably, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, endorsed colonial laws like the 1948 West Bengal Security Act. In fact, Nehru went a step further than the British. Through an arbitrary amendment in the Constitution, he expanded the ambit of the law from “the security of the state” to include “the interests of the security of the state,” which the current IT law continues. Evidently, the expanded ambit of “the interests of the security of the state” can include almost anything under the sun.
My two-fold points are straight. First, in describing BBC as colonial, the government erases the very fact of the colonial law it employed to ban the documentary. Second, Modi is simply continuing the British law made more draconian by Nehru, supposedly the rival of the BJP.
Blaming victims, Elevating perpetrators
There are many affinities between BJP’s worldview and the documentary. Early on, the voiceover in part one says: “fifty-seven people have died after a train carrying Hindu activists was set alight by a group of Muslims.” Standing close to the burnt train in Godhra, Jill McGivering, the then BBC India correspondent, subsequently reports:
