BBC doesn't release most of their documentaries in the US. I wouldn't assume there are any plans being held up, it's just too niche for any US distributors to bother. Maybe the interest due to India trying to ban it will change that...
I never understood the Indian ban. Aren't BBC documentaries available in the UK only anyways? Indian residents couldn't have accessed it without a VPN anyways.
Hardly only the UK, BBC world and many other divisions like the recently shuttered BBC Arabic focused on content and distribution primarily in commonwealth or emerging countries .
iplayer is how you get free access in the UK to BBC because residents pay the TV tax for it . Rest of the world you pay for it in some way as part of cable deal , subscriptions etc, or BBC decides to make it free or ad supported .
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Keep in mind BBC is no different than aljazeera it is state sponsored and is import part of soft power toolkit of the UK government uses
this doesn’t mean they are wrong or biased in anyway on the Modi documentary nothing in it is new or not widely known , for example until he became PM he was blocked from getting a U.S. visa for his role in the riots .
BBC content can be good like aljazeera (especially for non Qatari /ME content) can be but the inherent politics of it cannot be forgotten or ignored
It’s the result of a thin skinned paranoid government ruling the country.
There was gonna be absolutely no impact whatsoever if they had just kept quiet and not said a thing.
Instead their touchiness has meant that this has become a much bigger deal and is actually impacting their favorability negatively, at least anecdotally.
It's so pathetic how thin skinned this "strong"men are. Oh, you think I bear a nearly non-existent resemblance to a much loved storybook bear? Off to """reeducation""" camps with you!
You make a milquetoast documentary about things I did a decade ago that were pretty bad, GTFO!
"No you're a puppet, you are you are"
It's just pathetic. How does anyone look at these people and think they are strong?
I know nothing about India’s politics but Russia’s legal system is explicitly structured in the way that makes you break laws every step of the way so that law enforcement can be applied selectively
> BBC seems to have taken up a role as the anti-Modi network
Could you point to prominent sources making this claim?
> if it was also aimed at China
The BBC created diplomatic chaos between Downing Street and Beijing with their Xinjiang coverage [1][2]. I'm not sure why you think their coverage of Russia or Pakistan has been any less scathing.
> pointing to something Modi-positive they've ever run
See the BBC's coverage of his anti-poverty [3] and climate [4] work.
They made a video critical of Modi, herego the entire BBC has an anti-Modi bias? Yet when the BBC puts out content critical of Xi or Putin or Erdogan, it's not comparable?
And you didn't mention any of those other countries I named. Apparently it's too hard to them to write about them, or else "brutal oppression" isn't news to their viewers.
> [3] and [4[ are the same. Even have the same URL
Fixed.
> you didn't mention any of those other countries I named
BBC's exposé on the Uyghurs was a big deal. That you missed it, along with apparently their take on the Ukraine war, should be a nudge to look yourself.
The BBC are banned in China, Russia and have had many temporary bans in the past in India (70s), Myanmar, Rwanda, Zimbabwe etc. This is nothing new, the BBC think it is right and every other foreign country is wrong lOL
If they’re the best examples you have, all that does is further convince me that the BBC World Service is in fact the premiere reporting outfit in the world.
None of those are governments that right-thinking people have any truck with, and all have a marked history of suppressing inconvenient truth.
In other words, the BBC World Service usually _is_ right.
> the BBC think it is right and every other foreign country is wrong lOL
Actually that's what BJP thinks. Whenever anyone says anything against them, they are termed as a 'Conspiracy against the nation' or 'anti-national'. It is BJP who thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong, not the other way round :)
he said she said, but the proof is in the data, they won the last 2 elections with large majorities, so what india thinks is not what the bbc thinks ;)
They are trying to increase their reader base. Negative coverage of those countries won't get them many readers as BBC is straight up banned in China and other countries don't have a significant population. In India negative coverage runs wild and gets them more viewers.
There was a great post from a VPN provider about how they've honed circumvention tactics in China for years, and that whatever Russia was doing post-Ukraine was just primitive in comparison.
If India really tries to go down the internet censorship rabbit hole, its probably not gonna go well, as they are decades behind more seasoned despotic regimes.
Is that significant, though? These nations aren't trying to keep things secret. They just have to keep them out of the day to day thoughts of 95% of their population. Even trivial measures like a DNS-redirect will be effective in that regard.
I think they would fail to meet that 90-95% threshold, as India just can't be as physically restrictive as China or Russia. Circumvention measures would proliferate like crazy.
Blackhole any sites people of the opposing political use for political organization, donations, news, propaganda.
As a first pass, you don't even need to block general-purpose platforms like reddit and Twitter and Facebook, you just need to kill the centralized sources of political information.
The point of this exercise isn't a full on repression of all dissent, it's just shifting the political window to topics and mouthpieces that are friendly to you. Most people have mainstream opinions, and if you tilt the mainstream landscape towards you, by driving your opponents into high-friction underground echo chambers, a first past the post system lets you turn a close election into a landslide.
Oh but they are competing. The circumventors get access to tools and methods developed for those other countries, the global circumvention market if you will. But the Indian government is not getting China's or Russia's censorship experience.
The VPN doesn't matter a thing. The goal is to avoid mass access to subversive content, so it doesn't matter if someone somewhere can find a way to circumvent these measures.
At steady state yes, you want to control the overarching narrative sufficiently that nobody knows to ask the questions. But in the midst of protests like in Hong Kong a couple of years ago you may want specific measures to crack down in case the overarching narrative becomes "you should use a VPN"
India is pretty good at cracking down on communications in Jammu and Kashmir, yes? Pretty simple to roll that out to the whole country, if that's what you're looking for.
> Why should a British funded propaganda machine be even allowed in a foreign country?
Same reason why any other foreign website is allowed in India or why other countries watch Bollywood movies. Globalization is a win-win for everyone. No country in the world is self-sustaining.
There’s little one can do if some in the country are hell bent on putting their heads in sands like an ostrich. Doesn’t change the truth, unfortunately.
As for Al Jazeera and other channels you mentioned, they can be watched online – unlike the Modi documentary.
Which is still no reason to blatantly try and suppress their legal and democratic rights.
And anyways, at this point this has nothing to do with thr BBC. This is the BJP telling every other news agency in India, a year before the 2024 general elections, that if they dare publish anything the ruling party doesn’t like, they will use the entire power of the state to make the publishing entity’s life miserable.
If you want to understand why the BJP would risk the Streisand effect, it’s not because they are incompetent. It’s because this is a very deliberate and calculated message to every other press outlet in India to not mess with the BJP in the months before the election.
India is increasingly going down the slippery slope of repression that we have seen frequently in countries about 5-10 years before they lose their collective minds, and everyone wonders when the state "went bad".
Not OP but Many many instances of corrupt leaders or leaders with unpopular policies/poor governance being thrown out of power in elections peacefully. If anything, the fatalism & inability of Americans to change their political establishment tends to be puzzling for us.
obviously indices created by the west would rank themselves higher.
India has a much more robust democracy because Indians have several dozen political parties to choose from unlike the US which has only 2 recognised parties.
India has had Prime Ministers from even very small regional parties that formed giant coalitions.
Americans meanwhile are stuck with 2 parties they perpetually hate
You know that you are just throwing anecdotes around that don't reach any point right?
Just admit it, you are an Indian nationalist, who cares? Why should I be bothered by what you guys do at home? Just don't go around preaching how cool and open and democratic India is because anyone with a little bit of culture knows that it is only propaganda you're drinking and spitting.
You are clearly in denial, tell me what are the two parties that can form the central
BJP or Congress?
> India has had Prime Ministers from even very small regional parties that formed giant coalitions.
Key word is "has" what about the last 3 decades?
Having to choose between 2 or 1000 parties from is not democracy, India terribly suffers from incumbency peoblems. Most of those regional parties you talk about unless there is a significant change, most of the time, many seats are won back by incumbents.
During every elections there is horse-trading, bribing of voters, rigging, there have been major scams all which are not signals of a robust democracy.
Thousands of farmers protesting against a govt rule for almost an year is not a robust sign of democracy.
India is not even a hundred year old democracy. It’s way too early to speak about its robustness as a democracy.
Especially considering India has already had a non-Democratic period during emergency, which the previous leadership of the BJP understood the dangers of, since many of them were arrested then, but the current leadership seems keen on basically establishing as the norm.
Unfortunately the hubris and over-confidence you’re displaying is in itself a huge factor in a country losing its democratic nature.
then imagine what the collective hubris and arrogance displayed by the people in this sub-thread would imply about their respective countries’ democratic nature.
A more nuanced and informative view of this incident basically shows it was bureaucracy gone awry due to funding cuts and abuse. Not a top-down witch hunt.
Anyone who share OPIndia links, we can safely assume, is a "Bakth", Bakth is equivalent for MAGAhat.
Or they're in denial and think this kind of oppressive tactics are something to be proud of and come up with how its actually good for the nation.
BJP has been nothing opressive, jailing people on sedition charges. Banning content that speaks against them. Calling anyone who questions them an Anti-National. Man, I dont care if Obama did it or Queen of England did it, but why the heck do you want to think its okay because they did it.
Sorry but that's still an extremely simplistic take, if not to say ignorant. The poor bullied minorities™ went on to genocide Bangladeshis in East Pakistan for wanting independence and raped hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women, only a few years after Pakistan itself had seceded.
I know many Westerners love a good minority story but Islamists aren't that.
Lol now you are doing the same type of generalization but for the other side, sarcastically labeling Muslims in Pakistan as “poor bullies minorities” and “Islamists”.
The point isn’t that one side is inherently better the other, the point is that people feared minorities wouldn’t fare well in a United India due to longstanding communal issues.
Bangladesh war for independence is just supporting that point, as is RSS/Hindutva, etc.
> The point isn’t that one side is inherently better the other, the point is that people feared minorities wouldn’t fare well in a United India due to longstanding communal issues. Bangladesh war for independence is just supporting that point, as is RSS/Hindutva, etc.
This is nonsensical. The Liberation War is absolutely not an example of how "minorities won't fare well". For starters, the group targeted by the genocide was not an ethnic minority: they constituted the majority of the population of Pakistan!
If anything, the Liberation War is a story of people coming together across ethnic and religious divides in order to stop a genocide - literally the antithesis of "communal divides".
> The poor bullied minorities™ went on to genocide Bangladeshis in East Pakistan for wanting independence and raped hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women, only a few years after Pakistan itself had seceded.
A correction: they committed genocide against Bengalis in East Pakistan. Bangladesh did not exist yet, so "Bangladeshi" is an anachronism here.
Also, an extremely disproportionate number of Bengalis targeted in the killings were actually Hindu[0]. The place that is now Bangladesh used to have a much larger Hindu Bengali population than it does today, but many were killed during the genocide, and many of the survivors fled to India or other countries (either then or in the following years).
[0] Contemporary accounts place Hindus as the outright majority of victims, despite Hindus being a minority among Bengalis within East Pakistan. There's plenty of evidence that Hindus were specifically targeted by the military, although it would not be correct to say that it was a genocide [solely] against Bengali Hindus, because Bengalis at large were targeted, and the primary motivation was a suppression of Bengali national identity.
Just as not all Hindus are bullies, surely not all Muslims are Islamists? As an atheist I could give a single crap about these labels. Can we all agree that because some people there in category A did something bad to some people in category B, doesn’t mean it’s right for some other people in category B over here to hurt some other people in category A. Right?
At least the current nationalist Hindu government are authoritarian anti-democratic almost fascists, using democracy to reduce the rights of others and block competition.
The us is not without our own groups trying to keep others from voting. And although the US strives to be a democracy for all, we were historically and to a good extent today are very racist. But the imperfections of my own country doesn't prevent me pointing out problems in other countries, and it goes the other way too.
The reason the Indian government is afraid is because they know the secular Southern India will secede if they found out they're ruled by a religious North Indian madman who killed 750-2000 Muslims. Before this documentary the 2002 Gujarat events were largely brushed aside as ordinary 3rd world sectarian violence but the BBC documentary shows that Modi personally orchestrated the whole thing.
The complete balkanization of India is about to happen and I don't think the rest of the world will be able to cope with the number of refugees.
The Maurya Empire? Yeah right. You should thank the British for the Maurya empire. The so-called Maurya Empire was cooked up by a pseudo historian by the name of James Prinsep to instill a sense of one people for political purpose. The British at the time assumed the British empire in South Asia was forever and it was hard to rule a place when the people practically hate each other historically. This Maurya Empire thing is a way for the British to create some glue for their subjects. Called it a British duplicity if you will.
Yeah, a pillar here and a coin dug up there and you can weave a whole story. It this is true I would assume the British would learn this history from the native people in the subcontinent instead of the other way. It would be like the Europeans have never heard of the Roman Empire or Julius Caesar until they learned it from Japan.
Surely the British arrived in India well after 0 AD. Not sure how an empire that disolved long before then would matter to what the British saw when they first reached India.
I'm just citing one example from the many. India as an entity has been dissolved and established multiples times in the history. British came at the weak period of India, essentially during a long civil war that was going on across the whole subcontinent.
Lmao .. secular southern India - that’s a generalization that covers a population similar to all of America - the south is anti modi but for reasons completely unrelated to secularism .. also secession is such a fringe idea that it would make the secession movements in the USA look mainstream ..
source : me an Indian citizen who grew up in one of the southern states.
Oh boy! Secular south ? Clearly you have never been to india. Secession is not a possibility in fever dream. South is even more religious and conservative than north. Many actually like modi. my friend you are viewing india from a periscope whose view is too filled with bias. India is fine.
Also the riots happened more than two decades ago and most people don’t give a shit - you know how I know this - modi was a chief minister at the time of the riots and then went on to be the prime minister and is in his third term as prime minister .. you think people who didn’t give a shit back then are suddenly gonna rise up against a politician who is as popular as modi ..
> The reason the Indian government is afraid is because they know the secular Southern India will secede if they found out they're ruled by a religious North Indian madman who killed 750-2000 Muslims
I think the secular south would've been able to come to that conclusion before now; I already thought of Modi as a religious nut who was (at very least) highly complicit in the Gujarat violence. I'm a bit skeptical that this BBC documentary will be what breaks up india.
> The reason the Indian government is afraid is because they know the secular Southern India will secede if they found out they're ruled by a religious North Indian madman who killed 750-2000 Muslims.
This is a bizarre characterization of the awareness of the situation in India. Modi was blamed for the riots right from the beginning by every politician outside his alliance, including in South India. Modi's alleged guilt has been paraded before the voters in every election, big & small, national or local, since 2002. It has been one of the primary national political issues in India ever since, including a very well publicized court case that made its way through the Supreme Court. Even if it was a sham trial, it's bizarre to suggest that people in South India were somehow unaware of Modi's alleged guilt - till this documentary.
So the Indian government have got all the time in the world to raid offices over tax but don't do anything over scam call centres scamming innocent victims all over the world.
I feel like the US is in a position to simply have some police deliberately fall for these scams, then wire over the $25k as the scammer instructs, then trace that money as far as the indian border, then demand the indian government repay it.
The indian government can continue tracing and find the scammer to get their money back (hard), or just shut down the call centers (easier).
Yes, I know this isn't the way international disputes work right now. But I think the US is in a position to make demands like this, with the threat that US borders will be closed to indian nationals, goods and investment unless india pays up.
Repeat however many times are necessary to solve the problem.
Hit them where it hurts: Ban all family members of anybody in Indian government from entering the US for any reason. Not for school, nor a job, nor even a short vacation to visit other family members. Limit this ban to Indian politicians and their family members; most Indians should be unaffected.
Step 1 on the (very short) path to making the US dollar permanently lose its influence. Unless India starts invading Pakistan for conquest or population destruction, sanctions even on Indian politicians and their families go way too far (not to mention some of those sanctioned people would likely be top business leaders as well). The US is already testing its limits trying to go against Russia and China simultaneously. Economic warfare (for that is what sanctions effectively are) against India as well would be catastrophic.
> Economic warfare (for that is what sanctions effectively are) against India as well would be catastrophic.
No it wouldn't. India is still tiny economically compared to the US and the global economy. They have a $3.x trillion economy; the US is seven to eight times larger. Maybe in another 25-30 years they'll get to a $10t economy (in today's USD).
> The US is already testing its limits trying to go against Russia and China simultaneously
The US isn't testing its limits at all re Russia. We're not even breaking a sweat yet (we're hardly making an effort at industrial scaling just for military purposes for example). We're using our vast logistic machine to ship Ukraine weapons to defend itself, and they're doing most of the hard work. The US is using a few single digit percent beyond its normal pace for the Russia vs Ukraine war. We're not mass producing war machines just for that purpose for example; so far it's largely logistics/shipping/intel and modestly boosting a few types of ammo that Ukraine particularly needs. The US also has plenty of help from its NATO (and other) allies on sanctions and weaponry, which makes it that much easier on the US (not having to go it alone).
It's one thing to ban a politician if you can show they're profiteering from a scam call center but it's another to ban them just because there are scam call centers. Literally all I think you should have to do is show they're supporting them before you can do some sort of adverse action. But you do need to have proof first ...
They could just sanction the banks that take the money by cutting them off from SWIFT if they can’t track down who’s benefiting from these scams. You don’t even have to involve the Indian government.
Well, are the scam call centers paying taxes? Are they scamming domestically or only internationally? Are they embarrassing the government directly, or only indirectly?
What? Do you think those are mutually exclusive? Would India have stopped scammers if only they didn't spend their time on enforcing their tax code? Should they stop their other governmental activities until they have stopped scammers?
I mean this raid seems like it might be motivated by something other than just enforcing their tax code, sure. But you didn't bring that up. And I'm having trouble seeing the connection between this and scammers.
on a flip side what is the point of releasing it now vs before, seems some malice intent on part of BBC. Indian Supreme Court already aquitted Modi of the Riots in 2012.
There is no flip side. One action is democratic, the other isn’t.
But to answer your question, the documentary and its timing is the result of a UK report created by the UK consulate after the riots was made public within the last year or so because UK law requires such documents to be made public after a certain amount of time.
Finally, Modi being acquitted in an Indian court of law doesn’t mean innocence. Even ignoring any questions of corruption, etc, India does not have one of those legal systems which decides whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. India’s court system only decides whether someone can be proven guilty.
An acquittal simply means that one cannot be proven guilty, not that they are innocent. The not guilty verdict can also be the result of a lack of evidence (which was the case in this situation), or due to procedural mistakes, etc. which may lead to an acquittal even if someone is guilty.
Supreme court or a local mobile court, all function based on evidence. And evidence can be tampered.
And dont tell me in India people dont say "If he has money/power he will be free".
Courts dont investigate. They listen to what prosecution has to provide, if prosecustion has new evidence decades later, the acquital can be oveturned. Doesnt mean someone is innocent forever. Its not a certificate of innocence.
You do realise that you are literally turning gears in your head to come up with some witty line but end up justifying my comment yourself without even trying to understand what I said. If the BBC documentary can provide new evidence or some common person comes up with new evidence, they can literally repoen the case, and who knows may be the accusations may be found with a guilty verdict. There are several cases that have been re-opened, and verdicts reversed decades later. Supreme court giving a clean chit doesn't mean a permanent certificate of innocence. It just means evidence was not strong by prosecution during the trial.
Let's raid the foreign news. That'll go over well with the international community and foreign investors. We can build trust if we just make sure the journalists pay their taxes.
Like all those outraged Indian nationalists that pop up in flocks anywhere and every time there is a news outlet that goes against Indian nationalist propaganda and big boss Modi?
Well its bound to happens when the said news outlet forgets to show the other side of the story, selectively missing on the nuance. I'm no fan of Modi, No fan of half truths either.
It seems that "these days" every criticism is propaganda. It doesn't matter if the points are valid or not or if they're describing something that it's happening. "Propaganda!"
It's very sad to see people everywhere turning off their brains just because their government was criticised.
What's the other side of the story here? Are they being raided or not? Does the Indian state likes to start investigations after someone criticises them or not? And was the documentary so wrong to the point where it had to be censored?
1. BBC was sent a notice for tax evasion 2 months before this documentary was released - the fact that they are being raided now could be a reaction to the doc or maybe just a coincidence. No org is above the law, so being raided for tax evasion is business as usual.
2. The documentary doesn't cover the reason as to why the riots happened, it'll take nuance and understanding of the past 800 years history of islamic invasions to realise that it was not a one off incident.
1. The problem is not being raided for tax evasion. The problem is them and others being investigated/raided after criticising the government. It's the usual "we'll ignore things if you keep things quiet and make your life hard if you don't". No one is above the law, but the application of the law is very selective... Any journalist or org will get the message.
2. You want a 2 hour documentary that covers who did what, who did it first, back it all with believable proof, and also cover 800 years of nuance, interpretations, opinions... yeah, good luck with that. It's not going to happen.
There are indications of what happened and how some didn't do anything to stop it from happening. Pointing this out isn't an attack on India or Indians (there's a difference between you and the government/politicians). It is what it is, no need to be so defensive.
The funny thing is that no one really cared about this until the Indian government decided to censor it (why?) and presented it as an external attack (well, now I'm interested!). They decided to make a big deal out of something than only they actually cared. Now apparently the BBC is the "most corrupt organisation in the world" (to quote a BJP spokesperson) and raids are needed because, of course, "no one is above the law".
Be it India or another country, this is bad and shouldn't be defended or encouraged.
Its absurd to claim that nothing was done to stop it from happening, if that was the case then thing would have been much worse. It was brought under control as effectively as it is possible when the riots are happening at communal level.
Have you not seen riots happen in London few years ago, or the black lives matter, or so many others in the past. To use you own argument, why did they not stop it immediately? Because it takes some time and effort to control it when large populations are involved.
And nobody is asking to cover all the history, Nuance can be covered with small hints and by giving little bit of background. Otherwise People who dont know India's history only see what they see in the documentary and go on making up their mind.
Plus BBC is funded by UK government's so its essentially a mouthpiece for them. So Independent journalism is not really expected from them anyways.
I didn't claim that nothing was done to stop it from happening. Please re-read my comment.
I was living in London in 2011 when the riots happened. There was no parties/movements inciting anyone to kill/expel/hate a different group. The police killed one guy and that was the outcome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Mark_Duggan . Of course you can't stop this immediately, but you can stop people from spreading hate and stop yourself from associating with said people.
The documentary... honestly, no one cared about it. Maybe many Indians did care, but Indians should know that background. No one made a big deal outside India because usually people don't care that much about happened on the other part of the world (do you?). Anyway, how do you go from this to censor the content?
Now, I'm not going to say that they're the most independent and serious source in the world, but they went after the Tony Blair government (centre-left) in the 2000s, criticised the following conservative governments, and as you can see, the government doesn't like them that much: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/17/governments-at...
In any case, I really don't like media censorship or governments that go after people who criticise them or selectively apply laws. For me it's wrong.
It's identical to the Western response to the Iranian government murdering many thousands of their people (who were protesting) prior to the pandemic. Versus the response to the Khashoggi murder by the Saudis. Both reprehensible regimes, the media treated one death as being particularly special. Going by the massive coverage of Khashoggi, you'd get the impression thousands of murders is less important than one, and you'd be right re the Western media's obvious bias (they dislike Saudi Arabia more than Iran, and Khashoggi was one of their own).
The Iranian government was already known to be terrible to its people. The Saudis ordering an assassination _abroad, using their embassy, in such a violent way on a dissident_ made a lot of people aware of the problem that was the new Saudi regime which had some Western alignment. It’s not that this death was more important, it’s just revealed a big change in Saudi Arabia
Which ignores the vast gap between coverage in the one murder vs the thousands of murders. The bias was on open display, and it's a perceived political alignment issue (Saudi Arabia is quite friendly with US conservatives traditionally and far more hostile to US liberals; ~95%+ of journalists in the US vote left and they're rarely shy with their bias in the Trump era; Saudi was relatively friendly toward Trump and it's openly hostile toward Biden; all of this is quite obvious).
The news media is looking for new news, not old news. An ally killing someone in their embassy is new news; a regime of disrepute killing protestors is the same old story.
It's the same reason why election fraud in the US or Europe gets coverage when it's just a couple votes, but Russia's elections don't get much coverage. Everyone knows Russia's elections are a joke, but someone getting arrested for voting their deceased relative's ballot is unexpected.
It's not a measure of importance, it's a measure of newness.
It's a pattern repeated in many places. Single large events, a school shooting, the Khashoggi murder, big chemical spills, always get more coverage than repeated/ongoing or smaller events. IMO it's less a judgement on importance than a result of novelty or shock. Over time as events fall into routine people get bored of them so news naturally moves on. Look at the coverage of the Ukraine war it's dropped off a cliff since the early days of the invasion because we're in both the winter lull and there's not much novel to report about it every day.
Blow the whistle on what? Nothing in that documentary is new, most Indians know it. It has been reported and widely covered by Indian press before. It is just new to you (or the west).
You are forgetting one thing - most Indians knew it and believed it back in 2001 but now there's a whole generation who has been brainwashed to believe that the whole western world's media is against India because they don't want to see India be a power. They genuinely believe in this. These are the people who were probably 5 year olds then and are now in their late 20s or early 30s.
Obviously they don't think why they want to be a "superpower" when we still don't have clean water and our air is getting worse (literally unliveable by global standards)
Most Indians still know, it has been covered continuously these past two decades. Or maybe I am in the wrong information bubble. BJP’s political opponents won’t allow anyone to forget it.
Most people don't know all the details. They see news that court did not find any evidence and that's all they hear. Everyone wants to stay in a bubble of their liking.
So in your logic anyone can say whatever they like and there is no control at all, so lies can spread by malicious actors. I disagree and value this minimal control when exercised properly with checks, which is the case in europe
If people cannot be trusted to distinguish between information and misinformation, and you are a person, how can you then say that you have determined that the BBC documentary Modi has banned is not misinformation? Either people have to be shepherded through the library or they don't.
I didn't determine, but the BBC has a well deserved reputation as do its journalists. Also if Modi had nothing to hide, why these persecutions as opposed to focusing on disputing alleged facts with evidence
Because this is BBC the government is forced to stop at intimidation and using legal means too. There are simply way too many global eyes on the incident. Prior to this government, the media was largely free to do anything they want. Modi seems to have taken the additional step to thwart any negative reporting. This is just terrible for the country. Not surprising given his overall approach to governing
Isn't it impressive how incompetent authoritarian regimes are?
I mean, India has a great thing going. Geopolitically, it's exempt from bans on trading with Russia, so it can play both sides and get away with it. It has build up a vast services industry as the "back office of the world", a major driver of economic prosperity. It's likely the main beneficiary of re-shoring manufacturing out of China.
In this position, quite literally the dumbest thing you can do is to attract international attention by attacking a western institute like the BBC.
You weaken your position in geopolitics. You scare investors. You don't realize how unlike manufacturing, services are extremely easy to move to another country. And why even start manufacturing in this regime, when plenty of saner countries are nearby?
You want to gamble with all of that, for what? A BBC report that does nothing. Give it no attention and everything stays exactly the same.
Let's be real, the beneficiaries of re-shoring manufacturing were always going to be the countries that used to do it before China became the cheaper option.
I don't think that's right, apple moving some iPhone and other production to India is a big deal. But it's not going to be easy because of all the production lines and parts that are made by other companies in China and the built up expertise.
Alternative take: there will be no repercussions because of what you described. For one thing the EU is buying Indian diesel, isn’t that right? Probably among many other things.
> You scare investors. You don't realize how unlike manufacturing, services are extremely easy to move to another country. And why even start manufacturing in this regime, when plenty of saner countries are nearby?
You have it backwards. This is the stuff that manufacturers, and particularly capitalist American manufacturers go absolutely nuts for. Authoritarian governments are their wet dream. If you have an authoritarian govt on your side, there's nothing you can't get away with. Labour troubles disappear, red tape? gone! Environmental issues? swept under the carpet.
It doesn't get much more Authoritarian than China, and world manufacturing moved all moved there over the past 50 years.
Well, if we're going to be pointing fingers, let's not forget ourselves here: consumers. We gladly look away when consuming these cheap products.
The attraction is that it's cheap, nothing else matters. If it were cheap whilst the country was democratic, we'd still take it. So authoritarian is not the requirement, being low cost is. That said, yes it's a fair point that cheap correlates with an authoritarian regime with lax regulation. But it's not the only reason for being low cost, it can also be a result of a surplus of labor and the lack of an internal market.
Regardless, the recent insight is that moving all manufacturing into a superpower with nukes that changes alliances at a whim might have been a mistake. Hence another sizable country like India behaving unreliably isn't exactly looking attractive as the next destination.
Know your facts before you start name-calling India and start showing your biases. It's the world's largest and most vibrant democracy with a very comprehensive constitution. On the other hand, BBC has a long history of crappy reporting and tax evasion, not just in India but also in their home country.
I have read enough BBC articles on topics I know very well about and seen how poor and biased their reporting is. I don't want to fall victim to Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
What name-calling? I called the regime incompetent. Not India's inhabitants. I have no bias against Indian people, if I do, it's a positive one. 90% of my team is from India.
Lets be honest. Usually people used to make fun of me as an ex-Indian living in the West telling that the west is doomed because of Iraq, Bush, Trump etc.
Schadenfreude: it seems India are ready to dig themselves into a hole. This should benefit the West on the long run.
Attacking the press is never a good look in my book. Without even having seen the documentary, this convinces me that Modi is guilty of anything it accuses him of.
It doesn't matter what you think. Modi is hugely popular in India and won with a very strong mandate. Countering attempts of brainwashing by the former colonialists only makes Modi more of a hero to the locals. There is a reason Modi is taking up this fight, he could have choosen to ignore the bait. But it actually helps drive support for him in India. And it really shows in the latest approval ratings:
I don't really care what the people of India think, I'm just stating what this makes me think. I think I speak for most of the developed world when I say actions like this make the man look like a despot, and make us think less of India as a whole if they are OK with it.
There is A LOT of dirty little things you don't know about India. And it is not just the usual oppression of the Dalits and Muslims. I will talk about it in due time.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadhttps://peertube.tv/search?search=The%20Modi%20Question%20&s...
iplayer is how you get free access in the UK to BBC because residents pay the TV tax for it . Rest of the world you pay for it in some way as part of cable deal , subscriptions etc, or BBC decides to make it free or ad supported .
——
Keep in mind BBC is no different than aljazeera it is state sponsored and is import part of soft power toolkit of the UK government uses
this doesn’t mean they are wrong or biased in anyway on the Modi documentary nothing in it is new or not widely known , for example until he became PM he was blocked from getting a U.S. visa for his role in the riots .
BBC content can be good like aljazeera (especially for non Qatari /ME content) can be but the inherent politics of it cannot be forgotten or ignored
There was gonna be absolutely no impact whatsoever if they had just kept quiet and not said a thing.
Instead their touchiness has meant that this has become a much bigger deal and is actually impacting their favorability negatively, at least anecdotally.
You make a milquetoast documentary about things I did a decade ago that were pretty bad, GTFO!
"No you're a puppet, you are you are"
It's just pathetic. How does anyone look at these people and think they are strong?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTV_(Russia)#Change_of_managem...
Could you point to prominent sources making this claim?
> if it was also aimed at China
The BBC created diplomatic chaos between Downing Street and Beijing with their Xinjiang coverage [1][2]. I'm not sure why you think their coverage of Russia or Pakistan has been any less scathing.
> pointing to something Modi-positive they've ever run
See the BBC's coverage of his anti-poverty [3] and climate [4] work.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07g39mt
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000btl7
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41397022
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40144613
They made a video critical of Modi, herego the entire BBC has an anti-Modi bias? Yet when the BBC puts out content critical of Xi or Putin or Erdogan, it's not comparable?
And you didn't mention any of those other countries I named. Apparently it's too hard to them to write about them, or else "brutal oppression" isn't news to their viewers.
Fixed.
> you didn't mention any of those other countries I named
BBC's exposé on the Uyghurs was a big deal. That you missed it, along with apparently their take on the Ukraine war, should be a nudge to look yourself.
None of those are governments that right-thinking people have any truck with, and all have a marked history of suppressing inconvenient truth.
In other words, the BBC World Service usually _is_ right.
Actually that's what BJP thinks. Whenever anyone says anything against them, they are termed as a 'Conspiracy against the nation' or 'anti-national'. It is BJP who thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong, not the other way round :)
Why should they run positive coverage? Their job is to tell the truth, and if a leader is bad then they should say so.
If India really tries to go down the internet censorship rabbit hole, its probably not gonna go well, as they are decades behind more seasoned despotic regimes.
Hell, in the US, 10% should probably be sufficient.
As a first pass, you don't even need to block general-purpose platforms like reddit and Twitter and Facebook, you just need to kill the centralized sources of political information.
The point of this exercise isn't a full on repression of all dissent, it's just shifting the political window to topics and mouthpieces that are friendly to you. Most people have mainstream opinions, and if you tilt the mainstream landscape towards you, by driving your opponents into high-friction underground echo chambers, a first past the post system lets you turn a close election into a landslide.
Same reason why any other foreign website is allowed in India or why other countries watch Bollywood movies. Globalization is a win-win for everyone. No country in the world is self-sustaining.
There are several foreign channels that are banned in India including Al Jazeera and for very good reasons.
Plus, I’m sure the West doesn’t get Russia Today or CCTV right now. nor India’s DD
As for Al Jazeera and other channels you mentioned, they can be watched online – unlike the Modi documentary.
Al Jazeera isn't banned. In fact it is a free channel on most cable network providers
> Plus, I’m sure the West doesn’t get Russia Today or CCTV right now. nor India’s DD
Actually DD is also available in US, just like WION (another Indian news channel)
And anyways, at this point this has nothing to do with thr BBC. This is the BJP telling every other news agency in India, a year before the 2024 general elections, that if they dare publish anything the ruling party doesn’t like, they will use the entire power of the state to make the publishing entity’s life miserable.
If you want to understand why the BJP would risk the Streisand effect, it’s not because they are incompetent. It’s because this is a very deliberate and calculated message to every other press outlet in India to not mess with the BJP in the months before the election.
Out of curiosity, why do you think that is the case?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Like this one for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Almost all countries up in the list are so called "Western", while India is number 46. Most sources would more or less agree with this index.
India has a much more robust democracy because Indians have several dozen political parties to choose from unlike the US which has only 2 recognised parties.
India has had Prime Ministers from even very small regional parties that formed giant coalitions.
Americans meanwhile are stuck with 2 parties they perpetually hate
Just admit it, you are an Indian nationalist, who cares? Why should I be bothered by what you guys do at home? Just don't go around preaching how cool and open and democratic India is because anyone with a little bit of culture knows that it is only propaganda you're drinking and spitting.
BJP or Congress?
> India has had Prime Ministers from even very small regional parties that formed giant coalitions.
Key word is "has" what about the last 3 decades?
Having to choose between 2 or 1000 parties from is not democracy, India terribly suffers from incumbency peoblems. Most of those regional parties you talk about unless there is a significant change, most of the time, many seats are won back by incumbents.
During every elections there is horse-trading, bribing of voters, rigging, there have been major scams all which are not signals of a robust democracy.
Thousands of farmers protesting against a govt rule for almost an year is not a robust sign of democracy.
Especially considering India has already had a non-Democratic period during emergency, which the previous leadership of the BJP understood the dangers of, since many of them were arrested then, but the current leadership seems keen on basically establishing as the norm.
Unfortunately the hubris and over-confidence you’re displaying is in itself a huge factor in a country losing its democratic nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
This timeline checks out with your example.
I know many Westerners love a good minority story but Islamists aren't that.
The point isn’t that one side is inherently better the other, the point is that people feared minorities wouldn’t fare well in a United India due to longstanding communal issues.
Bangladesh war for independence is just supporting that point, as is RSS/Hindutva, etc.
This is nonsensical. The Liberation War is absolutely not an example of how "minorities won't fare well". For starters, the group targeted by the genocide was not an ethnic minority: they constituted the majority of the population of Pakistan!
If anything, the Liberation War is a story of people coming together across ethnic and religious divides in order to stop a genocide - literally the antithesis of "communal divides".
A correction: they committed genocide against Bengalis in East Pakistan. Bangladesh did not exist yet, so "Bangladeshi" is an anachronism here.
Also, an extremely disproportionate number of Bengalis targeted in the killings were actually Hindu[0]. The place that is now Bangladesh used to have a much larger Hindu Bengali population than it does today, but many were killed during the genocide, and many of the survivors fled to India or other countries (either then or in the following years).
[0] Contemporary accounts place Hindus as the outright majority of victims, despite Hindus being a minority among Bengalis within East Pakistan. There's plenty of evidence that Hindus were specifically targeted by the military, although it would not be correct to say that it was a genocide [solely] against Bengali Hindus, because Bengalis at large were targeted, and the primary motivation was a suppression of Bengali national identity.
The us is not without our own groups trying to keep others from voting. And although the US strives to be a democracy for all, we were historically and to a good extent today are very racist. But the imperfections of my own country doesn't prevent me pointing out problems in other countries, and it goes the other way too.
The complete balkanization of India is about to happen and I don't think the rest of the world will be able to cope with the number of refugees.
Anyways! Can you cite a non-pseudo source for you claims?
I found it interesting that Indians for some reason like to insist on this absurdity. There must be some benefits or advantages of making such claim.
source : me an Indian citizen who grew up in one of the southern states.
I think the secular south would've been able to come to that conclusion before now; I already thought of Modi as a religious nut who was (at very least) highly complicit in the Gujarat violence. I'm a bit skeptical that this BBC documentary will be what breaks up india.
This is a bizarre characterization of the awareness of the situation in India. Modi was blamed for the riots right from the beginning by every politician outside his alliance, including in South India. Modi's alleged guilt has been paraded before the voters in every election, big & small, national or local, since 2002. It has been one of the primary national political issues in India ever since, including a very well publicized court case that made its way through the Supreme Court. Even if it was a sham trial, it's bizarre to suggest that people in South India were somehow unaware of Modi's alleged guilt - till this documentary.
The indian government can continue tracing and find the scammer to get their money back (hard), or just shut down the call centers (easier).
Yes, I know this isn't the way international disputes work right now. But I think the US is in a position to make demands like this, with the threat that US borders will be closed to indian nationals, goods and investment unless india pays up.
Repeat however many times are necessary to solve the problem.
No it wouldn't. India is still tiny economically compared to the US and the global economy. They have a $3.x trillion economy; the US is seven to eight times larger. Maybe in another 25-30 years they'll get to a $10t economy (in today's USD).
> The US is already testing its limits trying to go against Russia and China simultaneously
The US isn't testing its limits at all re Russia. We're not even breaking a sweat yet (we're hardly making an effort at industrial scaling just for military purposes for example). We're using our vast logistic machine to ship Ukraine weapons to defend itself, and they're doing most of the hard work. The US is using a few single digit percent beyond its normal pace for the Russia vs Ukraine war. We're not mass producing war machines just for that purpose for example; so far it's largely logistics/shipping/intel and modestly boosting a few types of ammo that Ukraine particularly needs. The US also has plenty of help from its NATO (and other) allies on sanctions and weaponry, which makes it that much easier on the US (not having to go it alone).
Russia is just that mediocre.
The Wall Street journal headline from yesterday "To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast" https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/cpi-report-today-january-20...
It's one thing to ban a politician if you can show they're profiteering from a scam call center but it's another to ban them just because there are scam call centers. Literally all I think you should have to do is show they're supporting them before you can do some sort of adverse action. But you do need to have proof first ...
When Piyush explains why those DCOM errors in event log are super super important it brings a little joy to my heart
I mean this raid seems like it might be motivated by something other than just enforcing their tax code, sure. But you didn't bring that up. And I'm having trouble seeing the connection between this and scammers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmd_gIFTLTo
But to answer your question, the documentary and its timing is the result of a UK report created by the UK consulate after the riots was made public within the last year or so because UK law requires such documents to be made public after a certain amount of time.
Finally, Modi being acquitted in an Indian court of law doesn’t mean innocence. Even ignoring any questions of corruption, etc, India does not have one of those legal systems which decides whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. India’s court system only decides whether someone can be proven guilty.
An acquittal simply means that one cannot be proven guilty, not that they are innocent. The not guilty verdict can also be the result of a lack of evidence (which was the case in this situation), or due to procedural mistakes, etc. which may lead to an acquittal even if someone is guilty.
It's not what I come to HN for, in fact the lack of news is one of the reasons I come here.
It's very sad to see people everywhere turning off their brains just because their government was criticised.
1. BBC was sent a notice for tax evasion 2 months before this documentary was released - the fact that they are being raided now could be a reaction to the doc or maybe just a coincidence. No org is above the law, so being raided for tax evasion is business as usual.
2. The documentary doesn't cover the reason as to why the riots happened, it'll take nuance and understanding of the past 800 years history of islamic invasions to realise that it was not a one off incident.
2. You want a 2 hour documentary that covers who did what, who did it first, back it all with believable proof, and also cover 800 years of nuance, interpretations, opinions... yeah, good luck with that. It's not going to happen.
There are indications of what happened and how some didn't do anything to stop it from happening. Pointing this out isn't an attack on India or Indians (there's a difference between you and the government/politicians). It is what it is, no need to be so defensive.
The funny thing is that no one really cared about this until the Indian government decided to censor it (why?) and presented it as an external attack (well, now I'm interested!). They decided to make a big deal out of something than only they actually cared. Now apparently the BBC is the "most corrupt organisation in the world" (to quote a BJP spokesperson) and raids are needed because, of course, "no one is above the law".
Be it India or another country, this is bad and shouldn't be defended or encouraged.
Have you not seen riots happen in London few years ago, or the black lives matter, or so many others in the past. To use you own argument, why did they not stop it immediately? Because it takes some time and effort to control it when large populations are involved.
And nobody is asking to cover all the history, Nuance can be covered with small hints and by giving little bit of background. Otherwise People who dont know India's history only see what they see in the documentary and go on making up their mind.
Plus BBC is funded by UK government's so its essentially a mouthpiece for them. So Independent journalism is not really expected from them anyways.
I was living in London in 2011 when the riots happened. There was no parties/movements inciting anyone to kill/expel/hate a different group. The police killed one guy and that was the outcome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Mark_Duggan . Of course you can't stop this immediately, but you can stop people from spreading hate and stop yourself from associating with said people.
The documentary... honestly, no one cared about it. Maybe many Indians did care, but Indians should know that background. No one made a big deal outside India because usually people don't care that much about happened on the other part of the world (do you?). Anyway, how do you go from this to censor the content?
Most of BBC funding comes from a TV license paid by people with TVs, not from the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
Now, I'm not going to say that they're the most independent and serious source in the world, but they went after the Tony Blair government (centre-left) in the 2000s, criticised the following conservative governments, and as you can see, the government doesn't like them that much: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/17/governments-at...
In any case, I really don't like media censorship or governments that go after people who criticise them or selectively apply laws. For me it's wrong.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/it-raids...
You could write books about everything that is wrong with my country (many people do) but independent journalism is sacrosanct.
It's the same reason why election fraud in the US or Europe gets coverage when it's just a couple votes, but Russia's elections don't get much coverage. Everyone knows Russia's elections are a joke, but someone getting arrested for voting their deceased relative's ballot is unexpected.
It's not a measure of importance, it's a measure of newness.
Obviously they don't think why they want to be a "superpower" when we still don't have clean water and our air is getting worse (literally unliveable by global standards)
You have people like Margarita Simonyan calling for violence against Ukranians, Anton Krasovsky calling for the murder of Ukrainian kids, etc.
Has the BBC done anything like that in the past, say, 50 years?
If the Indian government have a legitimate complaint against the BBC they should do the same.
This is harassment, designed to intimidate, without providing an actual (valid or not) reason, or being an actual sanction.
The Russian state propaganda outlets operating abroad stopped being even slightly press-like a long time ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/ho...
I mean, India has a great thing going. Geopolitically, it's exempt from bans on trading with Russia, so it can play both sides and get away with it. It has build up a vast services industry as the "back office of the world", a major driver of economic prosperity. It's likely the main beneficiary of re-shoring manufacturing out of China.
In this position, quite literally the dumbest thing you can do is to attract international attention by attacking a western institute like the BBC.
You weaken your position in geopolitics. You scare investors. You don't realize how unlike manufacturing, services are extremely easy to move to another country. And why even start manufacturing in this regime, when plenty of saner countries are nearby?
You want to gamble with all of that, for what? A BBC report that does nothing. Give it no attention and everything stays exactly the same.
Namely: Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Japan.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/27/apple-shi...
A lot of India's electronics manufacturing at the moment is still limited to recycling (e.g, Sony Trinitron CRTs)
You have it backwards. This is the stuff that manufacturers, and particularly capitalist American manufacturers go absolutely nuts for. Authoritarian governments are their wet dream. If you have an authoritarian govt on your side, there's nothing you can't get away with. Labour troubles disappear, red tape? gone! Environmental issues? swept under the carpet.
It doesn't get much more Authoritarian than China, and world manufacturing moved all moved there over the past 50 years.
The attraction is that it's cheap, nothing else matters. If it were cheap whilst the country was democratic, we'd still take it. So authoritarian is not the requirement, being low cost is. That said, yes it's a fair point that cheap correlates with an authoritarian regime with lax regulation. But it's not the only reason for being low cost, it can also be a result of a surplus of labor and the lack of an internal market.
Regardless, the recent insight is that moving all manufacturing into a superpower with nukes that changes alliances at a whim might have been a mistake. Hence another sizable country like India behaving unreliably isn't exactly looking attractive as the next destination.
https://www.politico.eu/article/majority-of-western-companie...
Why would a comparatively insignificant transgression like this raid scare off investors?
Here is the documentary, why not watch it and see what you think about their reporting?
What name-calling? I called the regime incompetent. Not India's inhabitants. I have no bias against Indian people, if I do, it's a positive one. 90% of my team is from India.
Schadenfreude: it seems India are ready to dig themselves into a hole. This should benefit the West on the long run.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-tops-list-of-most-po...