Censorship Comes in All Shades and Sizes in India

Look at the manner in which the Modi government tied itself into knots while trying to slam the lid hard on the BBC Pandora’s box

The Government of India, in its present avatar, has displayed a rare appetite for censorship. This could range from something as seemingly discreet as power cuts to stop public screenings and presenting important information to courts in sealed envelopes; to shooting the messenger upfront by locking up journalists, sometimes for years on end, as is the case of Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan, who has been in jail since August 2018

But one of the intriguing aspects of the Narendra Modi government’s move to block the BBC programme, ‘India: The Modi Question’, was that it set off a string of unintended and untidy consequences. An attempt to shut down a work of documentation had the opposite result of publicising it contents widely. Nothing reflected this more than the way in which students in university campuses across the country organised, against all odds and massive police repression, public screenings of the proscribed documentary January 26).

Indeed their spontaneous actions of defending their right of freedom of expression, I would say, celebrated more effectively the 73 years of the Indian Constitution than a militaristic Republic Day parade streaming down Kartavya Path with the Egyptian president, widely regarded as a dictator in attendance as chief guest. Getting a handle on censorship is a difficult proposition.

Authoritarian leaders may want to do it, they may have the stomach to do it, they may have the infrastructure, laws and capacities to do it, but as German cultural theorist Beate Muller put it, censorship is “process of actions and reactions in the struggle for power, publicity, and the privilege to speak out, rather than merely as a repressive tool with predictable results”.

Look at the manner in which the Modi government tied itself into knots while trying to slam the lid hard on the BBC Pandora’s Box. Our first view of its discomfiture was captured in the hapless figure of the MEA spokesman who at the outset tried to kick the can down the road and ended up stubbing his toes badly. When asked about the banned documentary, he began: “Do note that it has not been screened in India so I cannot comment on it..,” or words to that effect.

But why was it not being screened in India – that after all was the moot question. The young mandarin, to be fair to him, should however be credited for having come up with three concepts that the Modi establishment quickly adopted to frame the official government position on the documentary: it was a “propaganda piece”, “lacking in objectivity”, symptomatic of “a continuing colonial mindset” Before long we were witness to an endless line of government apologists seizing the opportunity to appear more loyal than the other by tearing into the documentary.

There was the Aligarh Muslim University Vice Chancellor Tariq Mansoor who had, three years ago, already ingratiated himself with the political establishment by calling the troops into his campus to subdue students protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act. Now, he shrilly excoriated the BBC’s “biased reportage” that he claimed was “peppered with outdated condiments” (this should get him a governor’s post at the very least).

Then we had 303 “eminent Indians” come marching in. More than half of them were military personnel or former RWA officials and well steeped in command culture. They accused the BBC of “Delusion of British Imperial Resurrection” (whatever that may have meant, it certainly took the shine out of the “colonial mindset” terminology!).

To make their own biases clear while raising the charge of bias against the BBC, they began their public statement with this overwrought line: “Not this time. Not with our leader. Not with India. Never on our watch.” What? Some whom the nation had almost forgotten also came to throw pebbles into the pond. Kabir Bedi’s tweet full of righteous anger against an “utterly biased documentary” immediately caught the attention of television anchors looking out for studio guests who could be trusted to disparage the documentary.

Suddenly there was Bedi in the kindly glow of prime time studio chat shows, breathing in deep the oxygen of publicity. But all the chest beating and table thumping only meant that a docu-series that may have otherwise raised hackles in New Delhi for a few days, suddenly became a topic of conversation for the world.

It also prompted many at home to recall the violent political legacy of their prime minister and the innumerable ways his government had censored, and continues to censor, important public informat