How serious is Elon Musk over free speech? A little bit, only. Exhibit: he has recently caved into the Narendra Modi government in blocking access to two-part documentary, India: The Modi Question, which raised important questions about this regime. Modi was the chief minister of western Gujarat state in 2002, and there were bloody anti-Muslim riots in which more than 1,000 people were killed. That should be discussed, and Musk should not have censored it, indicating, he is a paper tiger.
“Elon Musk has caved in to pressure from India and removed a BBC documentary criticising PM Narendra Modi from Twitter.
The two-part documentary, India: The Modi Question, has not been broadcast in India by the BBC, but the nation’s federal government blocked it over the weekend and banned people from sharing clips on social media, citing emergency powers under its information technology laws.
Twitter and YouTube were ordered by the Indian government to block all links to the film within the country, Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said Tuesday.
He later said that both platforms ‘have complied with the directions’.
Musk markets himself as a free speech advocate, but his running of Twitter since October has been criticised as calamitous, with huge layoffs and experts predicting an eventual crash of the company.
On November 16, Twitter staff were told that they needed to sign a pledge to be able to stay on in their roles where they would be ‘working long hours at high intensity’ or receive three months of severance pay, resulting in a mass exodus.
Days later Musk announced that former president Donald Trump would have his Twitter account reinstated, tweeting: ‘The people have spoken’.
After a Twitter poll on the subject, Musk tweeted on December 21: ‘I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!’
The first part of the Modi documentary, released last week by the BBC for its UK audiences, revives the most controversial episode of Modi’s political career when he was the chief minister of western Gujarat state in 2002. It focuses on bloody anti-Muslim riots in which more than 1,000 people were killed.
Days after India blocked the documentary and banned people from sharing it online, authorities are scrambling to halt screenings of the film at colleges and universities and restrict clips of it on social media, a move that has been decried by critics as an assault on press freedom.
Tensions escalated in the capital, New Delhi, on Wednesday at Jamia Millia University where a student group said it planned to screen the banned documentary, prompting scores of police officers equipped with tear gas and riot gear to gather outside campus gates.
Police, some in plain clothes, scuffled with protesting students and detained at least half a dozen of them, who were taken away in a van.
The university cut off power and the internet on its campus on Tuesday before the documentary was scheduled to be screened by a students’ union.
Authorities said it would disturb peace on campus, but students nonetheless watched the documentary on their laptops and mobile phones after sharing it on messaging services like Telegram and WhatsApp.
The documentary has also caused a storm at other Indian universities.
Authorities at the University of Hyderabad, in India’s south, have begun a probe after a student group showed the banned documentary earlier this week. In the southern state of Kerala, workers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party held demonstrations on Tuesday after some student groups affiliated with rival political parties defied the ban and screened the film.
The riots have long hounded Modi because of allegations that authorities under his watch allowed and even encouraged the bloodshed. Modi has denied the accusations, and the Supreme Court has said it found no evidence to prosecute him. Last year, the country’s top court dismissed a petition filed by a Muslim victim questioning Modi’s exoneration.
The first part of the BBC documentary relies on interviews with victims of the riots, journalists and rights activists, who say Modi looked the other way during the riots. It cites, for the first time, a secret British diplomatic investigation that concluded Modi was ‘directly responsible’ for the ‘climate of impunity’.
The documentary includes the testimony of then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who says the British investigation found that the violence by Hindu nationalists aimed to ‘purge Muslims from Hindu areas’ and that it had all the ‘hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing’.
Suspicions that Modi quietly supported the riots led the US, UK and EU to deny him a visa, a move that has since been reversed.
India’s Foreign Ministry last week called the documentary a ‘propaganda piece designed to push a particularly discredited narrative’ that lacks objectivity and slammed it for ‘bias’ and ‘a continuing colonial mindset’.
Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser in the government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced it as ‘anti-India garbage’.
The BBC said in a statement that the documentary was ‘rigorously researched’ and involved a wide range of voices and opinions.
‘We offered the Indian Government a right to reply to the matters raised in the series – it declined to respond,’ the statement said.
The second part of the documentary, released Tuesday in the UK, ‘examines the track record of Narendra Modi’s government following his re-election in 2019,’ according to the film’s description on the BBC website.
In recent years, India’s Muslim minority has been at the receiving end of violence from Hindu nationalists, emboldened by a prime minister who has mostly stayed quiet on such attacks since he was first elected in 2014.
The ban on the documentary has set off a wave of criticism from opposition parties and rights groups that slammed it as an attack against press freedom. It also drew more attention to the documentary, sparking scores of social media users to share clips on WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.
‘You can ban, you can suppress the press, you can control the institutions – but the truth is the truth. It has a nasty habit of coming out,’ Rahul Gandhi, a leader in the opposition Congress party, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.
Mahua Moitra, a lawmaker from the Trinamool Congress political party, on Tuesday tweeted a new link after a previous one was taken down.
‘Good, bad, or ugly – we decide. Govt doesn’t tell us what to watch,’ Moitra said in her tweet, which was still up Wednesday morning.
Human Rights Watch said the ban reflected a broader crackdown on minorities under the Modi government, which the rights group said has frequently invoked draconian laws to muzzle criticism.
Critics say press freedom in India has declined in recent years and the country fell eight places, to 150 out of 180 countries, in last year’s Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. They accuse Modi’s government of silencing criticism on social media, particularly on Twitter, a charge seniour leaders of the governing party have denied.
Modi’s government has regularly pressured Twitter to restrict or ban content it deems critical of the prime minister or his party. Last year, it threatened to arrest Twitter staff in the country over their refusal to ban accounts run by critics after implementing sweeping new regulations for technology and social media companies.
The ban on the BBC documentary comes after a proposal from the government to give its Press Information Bureau and other ‘fact-checking’ agencies powers to take down news deemed ‘fake or false’ from digital platforms.
The Editors Guild of India urged the government to withdraw the proposal, saying such a change would be akin to censorship.