The US government locked up Al Capone on a tax issue, not his murder record. The Indian authorities who last week decided to charge the BBC, two months after registering its newsrooms in Delhi and Mumbai, have also done so for a story of deaths. Around two thousand. But these were not put on by the British network.
The one from the BBC is The Modi question, a two-part documentary broadcast in February only for the UK and Channel 2. Still, it took the Indian prime minister off the hook. Especially the half that reconstructs the anti-Muslim pogrom that for three days in 2002 ravaged the state of Gujarat, when its head of government and head of the police was Narendra Modi.
New Delhi ordered Twitter, YouTube and other platforms to remove links to the documentary in India. Some universities, such as Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru, tried to circumvent censorship with film clubs, but screenings were aborted by riot police.
The documentary is devastating for Modi, but it includes similar points of view and does not forget what was the spark of the pogrom. Hours earlier, a train loaded with Hindu extremists who were returning from demanding a Rama temple on the ruins of the Ayodhya mosque, was set on fire by a mob of Muslims at Godhra station.
58 of Modi’s comrades died, whose party, the BJP, orbits around the same Hindu supremacist organization (RSS) as theirs. Violence, in a state prone to riots, despite being the land of Gandhi, was taken for granted. But the Modi government, instead of containing it, encouraged it when it allowed the charred remains to be put on display in the capital.
That carnage, in the face of police passivity, not only did not ruin Modi’s career but was instrumental in catapulting it to a national scale. Although the United States and the United Kingdom banned his entry for many years. Even Gujarati businessmen blamed him for the killing. He was only defended by Gautam Adani, who with Modi already in New Delhi fleetingly rose to the top of Asia’s fortune. The second part portrays more recent episodes of Islamophobia, inspired or protected by Hindu chauvinism in power. From the lynching of dozens of beef transporters to the suppression of self-government in Kashmir, passing through the citizenship law that discriminates against Muslim immigration. It also reflects the suppression of protests at Jamia Millia Islamia University and the pogrom conundrum in northeast Delhi, just before covid.
A foreign TV crew that wanted to film this documentary would never have obtained the necessary visas. If the BBC was able to avoid them it is thanks to the Indian staff in its newsrooms in New Delhi and Mumbai. That is why both were registered by the police shortly after the broadcast. With the “evidence” obtained, the anti-fraud agency last week accused the BBC of violating the rules on the introduction and exchange of currencies.
In reality, nothing that appears in The Modi question is new to any informed Indian, even though young people who were not yet born will be voting in the elections a year from now. What some are wondering is why the BBC is now recalling Modi, for “archived” matters.
Modi recently celebrated 75 years of Indian independence by placing a statue of anti-British leader Subhas Chandra Bose on the stone pallium that once belonged to George V. And Britain is in a rush to seal a free trade deal that India subject to concessions on immigration.
The fact is that there would already be material for a third part. The face of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, has just been sentenced to two years in prison and disqualified for asking at a rally “why must all thieves be called Modi”.
