The raid on the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai followed the airing of a documentary, “India: the Modi Question”. It charts Narendra Modi’s career-long efforts to demonise India’s 200m-odd Muslims
’s airing last month of a two-part documentary, “India: the Modi Question”. It charts Mr Modi’s career-long efforts to demonise India’s 200m-odd Muslims. It examines above all the prime minister’s role in an outbreak of sectarian violence in 2002 in Gujarat, during his time as chief minister of the state, in which over 1,000 died, most of them Muslims.
The prime minister is nothing if not thin-skinned. His government invoked “emergency” powers to ban the documentary in India, including on social media. When students tried to screen it at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, a left-leaning institution that Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party loathes, the authorities cut the electricity. The ruling party’s spokesman describes the British broadcaster as “the most corrupt organisation in the world”, engaged in “hatred-fuelled work against India”.
In the media, an army of corybantic Hindu trolls celebrates such outrages. Each is chalked up as a victory for the Hindu nation they mistakenly consider India, a land of amazing diversity, to be. As Apoorvanand, a columnist for the Wire, a news website, points out, the New-York-based short-seller Hindenburg Research would also be a target for revenge if it had operations in India.
The doubters also underestimate the limpness of Mr Modi’s Western allies. America, Britain and the rest may express some small concerns, from time to time, about minority rights and press freedoms in India. But what matters to them is the vast economic potential of the Indian market and their longing for an Indian bulwark in the West’s struggle for supremacy with China.
Last month Britain’s especially limp prime minister, Rishi Sunak, suggested he did not “agree at all” with the unpublished report’s characterisation of Mr Modi. There has been no full-throated backing in London or Washington for thelet alone for Mr Modi’s far more vulnerable Indian victims. Fair enough, you might say; geopolitics is a rough game. But next time Banyan hears a Western leader congratulating Mr Modi on their countries’ “shared democratic values”, his stomach will turn.
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