Today, on 14 February, the Income Tax officials raided the BBC India offices. Before the raid is hurriedly taken as a sign of BBC’s full-blown criticism of the Indian government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we must not ignore the many similarities between the recent two-part BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question, and the worldview of Modi.
Against the uncritical celebration of the BBC documentary by many deemed critical of Modi, I show how it instead reproduces the ideology he and Indian/Hindu nationalism at large subscribe to. At the outset, let’s deal with the most likely objection to my argument: if the documentary partakes in the anti-Muslim ideology of Modi’s party, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), why did the government ban it?
The law used to ban the BBC documentary is also colonial
The Indian government described the documentary as reflecting the “continuing colonial mindset.” But what can be more comical than the fact the law banning the documentary is itself colonial. The Information Technology (IT) law used to impose the ban criminalizes contents that are deemed against “the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India” and “security of the State.” This law springs directly from the British colonial law: the 1919 Rowlatt Act, itself derived from the Defense of India Act of 1915. Both these laws criminalized activities defined as “a threat to the security of the state.”
Evidently, the expanded ambit of “the interests of the security of the state” can include almost anything under the sun.
Notably, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, endorsed colonial laws like the 1948 West Bengal Security Act. In fact, Nehru went a step further than the British. Through an arbitrary amendment in the Constitution, he expanded the ambit of the law from “the security of the state” to include “the interests of the security of the state,” which the current IT law continues. Evidently, the expanded ambit of “the interests of the security of the state” can include almost anything under the sun.
My two-fold points are straight. First, in describing BBC as colonial, the government erases the very fact of the colonial law it employed to ban the documentary. Second, Modi is simply continuing the British law made more draconian by Nehru, supposedly the rival of the BJP.
Blaming victims, Elevating perpetrators
There are many affinities between BJP’s worldview and the documentary. Early on, the voiceover in part one says: “fifty-seven people have died after a train carrying Hindu activists was set alight by a group of Muslims.” Standing close to the burnt train in Godhra, Jill McGivering, the then BBC India correspondent, subsequently reports: “In some areas, the grief and anger [among Hindus] here have already erupted into violence [against Muslims].”
Since the voiceover and McGivering’s report constitute BBC’s own position, we must underline the biases in both. Without evidence, the voiceover blames Muslims for the death of fifty-seven who are explicitly identified as Hindus. That is, BBC ensures that viewers take Muslims as attackers and Hindus as victims. The subsequent report legitimizes this framing because the anti-Muslim pogrom that continued for three days in Gujarat and which led to killing of over 2,000 Muslims is described as “erupting” from “the grief and anger” among Hindus.
Mark that while BBC describes the burning of the train as an act by Muslims as a group, hence planned and coordinated; the anti-Muslim pogrom is termed simply as having “erupted” and hence spontaneous. In the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘erupt’ means a natural, unplanned processes such as coming of teeth through gums. Clearly, the anti-Muslim pogrom was neither spontaneous nor unplanned.
Clearly, the anti-Muslim pogrom was neither spontaneous nor unplanned.
BBC’s twin strategy of blaming Muslims for the death of fifty-seven Hindus and terming the violence of anti-Muslim pogrom as eruption are not only factually incorrect and grossly biased, they in fact partake in the language supplied by BJP or Indian/Hindu nationalism. Recall Modi justified the pogrom in Newton’s language of action and reaction: “Earlier, these people [Muslims] had murdered women teachers [in Godhra]. And now they have done this terrible crime for which a reaction is going on.” The dominant phrase “post-Godhra riots” used not just by BJP but also by its rival parties, including by most media, belongs to a repertoire that takes it that Muslims invite violence against themselves because it is they who initiate it.
In part two, the documentary names Hindus engaged in the barbaric lynching of Muslims not as killers or criminals but as “cow vigilantes.” Far from being critical, note that cow vigilante is a dignifying term supplied by BJP. Historically, cow vigilante as a term belongs to the anti-Muslim, Hindu “cow protection” movement of Indian nationalism in colonial India. Contrary to its own documentation of such lynching backed by politicians, the documentary incomprehensibly describes the issue as “enmity between Hindus and Muslims.”
Colonial-orientalist theory of violence and rampant Islamophobia
Obviously, to analyze violence in terms of Newton’s action-reaction maxim is anything but “impartial and independent,” the motto of BBC. That leaders in a democracy uphold it is, to say the least, alarming. More alarming is the ratification in 2012 of Modi’s theory of action and reaction by a special investigation team appointed by the Supreme Court.
And this theory is pervasive, including in law. The attackers at Godhra train station were tried under the new anti-terrorism law, while culprits of “retaliatory” pogrom against Muslims under the Indian Penal Code. The creation of different categories of criminals and their placement under different laws emanate from colonial-orientalist knowledge.
After the failed anti-British rebellion in 1857, Orientalist W.W. Hunter depicted Muslims as “fanatic.” To Hunter, violence by Muslims emanated from their religious “fanaticism.” The “postcolonial” Indian power elites liked this Orientalism, amplifying that violence by “peaceful” Hindus is always “defensive.” Examining the post-9/11 politics of law, anthropologist Julia Eckert remarked that “there was the perception of a growing double standard in Indian law or of a dual law that judged Muslim violence and protest as terrorism and Hindu violence as ‘natural reaction’ or spontaneous ‘outburst.’”
Astonishingly, the BBC documentary is silent about counterterrorism accompanied by Islamophobia.
Astonishingly, the documentary is silent about counterterrorism accompanied by Islamophobia. Can one, however, understand Indian or international politics since 9/11, which also marks Modi’s entry into open politics, without the global war on terror? Before becoming Gujarat Chief Minister and soon after the horrific 9/11 attacks in the US, in a TV debate and as BJP’s general secretary, Modi had linked Islam with terrorism. To him, terrorism was innate to Islam and the “whole world” had witnessed terrorism “for 1,400 years” (since the Prophet Muhammad’s time).
Despite the fact that post-9/11 politics, including Modi’s, revolves around Islamophobia and terrorism, how to explain their absence from the documentary? The absence seems due probably to BBC’s own contribution – minor or major – to Islamophobia. Only days after she had vilified Islam, describing deception as integral to Muslims’ faith, BBC, for example, invited Melanie Phillips as a guest in its program, Politics Live, in 2019.
Such a practice is not a one-off. In April 2014 and before he was elected Prime Minister, Ritula Shah of BBC Radio 4 described him as “charismatic.” Based on her own reporting from an election rally she covered, Shah said: “Narendra Modi is a compelling orator. At a rally I attended in Delhi recently, the crowd was rapt attentive, almost mesmerized by this broad-chested bare of a man.” Shah preferred not to tell her listeners that Modi the orator had his speeches filled with Islamophobia such that listening to his speech while he was Gujarat Chief Minister, a young woman sitting in the front row screamed: “Kill the Muslim motherfuckers.”
On this matter, the BBC documentary has no hope for the future either.
Clearly, my point is not that there is nothing critical in the BBC documentary. There is. Referring to the British government’s report about the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Jack Straw, the then British Foreign Secretary said: “These were very serious claims – that Chief Minister Modi had played a pretty active part in pulling back the police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.” However, he simultaneously stressed that “we are never going to break diplomatic relations with India.”
From the perspective of justice-seeking humanity brutalized by the Gujarat pogrom carried out under Modi as Chief Minister, Straw’s later statement cancels the earlier one. On this matter, the BBC documentary has no hope for the future either. Toward the end in the final part, two European academics are interviewed. They observe that since the West needs India as an ally to counter China, it is unlikely that the West will raise any consequential voice against the ongoing violent dehumanization in India. One is left wondering if such a message is either independent or impartial (or neither).
So, what the raid by Income Tax officials at the BBC offices shows is this: the government desires sameness, not only similarity, between its own worldview and that of the media such as the BBC.
George Orwell, briefly employed by BBC during WW II, had privately described his employer as “a mixture of whoreshopand lunatic asylum.” Aware of our own context as different from Orwell’s, readers can judge if and how his observation needs to be revised.
A political anthropologist, Irfan Ahmad is a professor of Sociology at Ibn Haldun University, Turkey. Until early 2022, he was a senior research fellow at Max Planck Institute, Gottingen, Germany. Most recently, he is the author of Religion as Critique, editor of The Nation Form in the Global Age: Ethnographic Perspectives, and co-editor of The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India’s 2014 Election. He has been interviewed, inter alia, by Al-Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, Frontline, The Hindu, New York Times, NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands), Sky News (Australia), and TRT World. He tweets @IrfanHindustan
