A documentary unavailable through normal online distribution inside India has become one of the country’s most discussed political stories this week.
The BBC’s two-part documentary India: The Modi Question examines Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political career, particularly his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat during the communal violence of 2002, when more than a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslims. The documentary includes reporting on a previously unpublished British government assessment produced after the violence and revisits longstanding allegations concerning the conduct of Gujarat’s government.
The Indian government has rejected the documentary strongly. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi described it as a “propaganda piece” lacking objectivity and reflecting a colonial mindset. The government subsequently invoked emergency provisions under India’s Information Technology Rules to direct online platforms to block access to the documentary and posts containing links to it within India.
That decision has transformed the political argument.
The original question concerned what the BBC documentary says about Narendra Modi and Gujarat in 2002.
The second question is now about whether Indians should be allowed to watch it and decide what they think.
Those questions should remain separate.
A documentary can be biased and still deserve to remain accessible.
A government can be correct that journalism is flawed without therefore acquiring a legitimate reason to prohibit citizens from viewing it.
Freedom of expression would mean very little if it protected only information governments considered accurate.
The entire purpose of the principle is that governments are not supposed to possess a monopoly over deciding which political arguments citizens may encounter.
This does not mean freedom of expression is absolute. Democracies restrict particular categories of speech for reasons including direct incitement, national security, defamation and other legally recognised harms.
The threshold should be high when the material concerns criticism of the government itself.
There is an obvious conflict of interest.
If the government being criticised also determines whether the criticism may be distributed, the regulator and subject of regulation become the same actor.
That does not prove every restriction is illegitimate.
It means unusually strong procedural safeguards are necessary.
This is another application of a principle that has appeared repeatedly throughout these posts: institutions should not become final judges of their own interests.
Presidents should not determine whether elections they lost were fraudulent.
Police should not be the only institutions investigating alleged police misconduct.
Governments should not possess unrestricted authority to decide whether journalism criticising them is sufficiently accurate to be seen.
Independent review matters precisely because interested parties have incentives.
The government’s criticism of the BBC also deserves consideration rather than caricature. Western media organisations are not neutral institutions floating above history. The BBC comes from Britain, the former colonial ruler of India, and British representations of India have historically been shaped by imperial assumptions.
Indian sensitivity towards paternalistic Western commentary is therefore not imaginary.
More broadly, Western governments and media organisations sometimes apply standards inconsistently when evaluating political violence, minority rights or democratic institutions outside Europe and North America.
Post-colonial states have legitimate reasons to scrutinise who is producing narratives about them and which historical assumptions shape those narratives.
But source criticism and censorship are different responses.
If the BBC’s documentary contains errors, identify them.
If evidence is presented selectively, publish the omitted evidence.
If the British government assessment cited in the programme was flawed, explain why.
If the documentary ignores findings favourable to Modi, place those findings beside it.
The strongest response to bad information is usually better information when the political system permits it.
Blocking the material changes the argument from whether the documentary is credible to whether the government is afraid of citizens seeing it.
That may be strategically counterproductive even for a government convinced the documentary is unfair.
Censorship creates what is sometimes called the Streisand effect: attempts to suppress information can increase public interest in precisely the material being suppressed.
Before the government’s intervention, many Indians might never have watched a two-part British television documentary about events twenty years ago.
After blocking orders, students are organising screenings.
People are sharing copies through alternative channels.
International media are reporting on the ban.
The act of suppression becomes news larger than the original content.
This is an information paradox.
A government blocks something because it considers the information politically harmful.
The blocking itself signals that the government considers the information important.
Citizens who previously ignored it become curious.
Suppression therefore increases the informational value of the material.
This does not happen every time. Governments can suppress information very effectively, particularly when they control infrastructure comprehensively.
But in an open society with widespread internet access, universities, opposition parties, courts and independent media, complete suppression becomes extremely difficult.
India is not China.
That institutional difference matters.
Indian citizens possess vastly greater space for electoral competition, political opposition and public criticism than citizens under a one-party authoritarian system. Modi’s government faces opposition parties, independent courts, federal state governments controlled by rivals, a large and diverse media environment and regular competitive elections.
Using emergency information powers inside that system therefore deserves particular scrutiny because censorship can gradually alter the informational openness on which electoral competition depends.
Democratic erosion does not require cancelling elections.
It can occur when the information environment surrounding elections becomes progressively less competitive.
If governments possess greater ability to restrict hostile reporting while supporters retain broad ability to circulate favourable narratives, elections remain formally competitive but citizens encounter an increasingly asymmetric political marketplace.
This is why press freedom should be understood as electoral infrastructure.
Voting occurs on one day.
The information through which citizens decide how to vote accumulates over years.
A government cannot reasonably claim that citizens possess full electoral freedom if it systematically restricts their ability to encounter criticism of those currently in power.
Again, that does not mean every piece of journalism deserves immunity from law.
Defamation remains defamation.
Incitement remains incitement.
National-security secrets can create genuine harms.
The relevant principle is viewpoint neutrality: legal standards should apply because of the type of harm involved, not because the political conclusion embarrasses the government.
That test becomes especially important when emergency powers are used.
Emergency procedures exist because ordinary legal processes can sometimes be too slow to prevent immediate harm.
The benefit is speed.
The danger is reduced scrutiny.
Governments therefore have incentives to classify politically inconvenient problems as emergencies because emergency authority allows them to bypass ordinary institutional friction.
This is why emergency powers should always trigger the question: what exactly was the emergency?
A documentary criticising the prime minister may be politically controversial.
Controversy is not automatically emergency.
The government would need to demonstrate why normal legal procedures were inadequate and what concrete harm justified rapid blocking.
Otherwise exceptional powers begin becoming ordinary administrative tools.
That is how constitutional boundaries shift gradually.
Nobody announces that freedom of expression has ended.
A new category of content is restricted.
Then another.
A precedent is created.
Future governments inherit the precedent.
This last point should matter particularly to supporters of Modi.
A legal power created to block material considered misleading about a BJP prime minister does not disappear when another party eventually controls the central government.
Would BJP supporters be comfortable with a future Congress government using the same emergency mechanism to block a documentary alleging corruption by a Congress leader?
If not, the problem lies in the power rather than merely who currently exercises it.
This is the veil-of-ignorance test again.
Political parties should evaluate state powers as though their opponents will eventually inherit them.
Because in a democracy, they should.
That expectation of alternation is one of the strongest safeguards against excessive government authority.
If politicians secretly believe their party will govern permanently, they have fewer incentives to constrain powers they create.
This is why democratic contestability matters even before an election.
The BBC controversy also raises a difficult question about historical accountability. The Gujarat violence occurred more than twenty years ago. Modi has subsequently won repeated elections, first in Gujarat and later nationally. His supporters can reasonably argue that the issue has been investigated extensively and that political opponents repeatedly return to 2002 because they have been unable to defeat him electorally.
There is some political truth in that argument.
Historical controversies can become instruments through which opponents attempt to relitigate battles voters appear to have moved beyond.
But electoral victory does not close historical inquiry.
Winning an election is not an acquittal because elections are not courts.
The reverse is equally important: critical journalism is not a conviction because journalists are not judges.
Different institutions answer different questions.
Courts determine legal liability.
Historians evaluate evidence about the past.
Journalists investigate.
Voters determine political authority.
Confusing those functions creates unnecessary conflict.
The Supreme Court’s treatment of litigation connected to the Special Investigation Team matters legally. The BBC documentary may introduce or emphasise other historical evidence relevant to public interpretation.
Citizens can examine both without assuming either automatically determines the other.
This is what an open information environment is supposed to allow.
Competing sources.
Competing interpretations.
Then judgement.
The university screenings this week make the generational dimension particularly interesting. Many students watching the documentary were children or not yet born during the 2002 riots.
For them, Gujarat is history rather than personal political memory.
That changes how events are interpreted.
Older voters may remember the insecurity, communal tensions and political context directly.
Younger citizens encounter the events through documents, journalism, textbooks, political narratives and archived footage.
Control over historical narrative therefore becomes more politically important as living memory recedes.
Governments understand this.
So do opposition movements.
History is political capital because interpretations of the past influence legitimacy in the present.
This is why states everywhere argue over school curricula, monuments, archives and commemorations.
The disagreement is rarely only about what happened.
It is about what what happened means for who should possess legitimacy now.
India’s colonial history makes these battles especially complicated. The government’s description of the BBC documentary as reflecting a “colonial mindset” draws on a powerful and legitimate national memory of foreign domination.
But anti-colonial language should be used carefully.
Criticism originating in Britain does not become invalid because Britain colonised India.
If nationality determined whether criticism could be legitimate, historical reasoning would collapse into identity.
Evidence should still matter.
Post-colonial sovereignty means India determines its own political future.
It does not mean Indians benefit from being prevented from hearing foreign criticism.
In fact, a confident post-colonial democracy should be capable of consuming hostile foreign commentary without treating citizens as though they require state protection from it.
Sovereignty belongs to citizens too.
This may be the most important distinction.
Governments sometimes speak about national sovereignty as though the state and citizen are the same entity. A foreign documentary criticises the government, so the documentary is framed as attacking India.
But the government is not the country.
Modi is not India.
The BJP is not India.
Congress is not India.
The BBC criticising an Indian prime minister is not automatically criticising 1.4 billion Indians.
Democratic patriotism requires preserving that distinction.
Governments are temporary occupants of the state.
Citizens are entitled to criticise them precisely because the country belongs to more than whoever currently governs it.
This is where nationalism can either strengthen or weaken democracy.
An inclusive nationalism says citizens with radically different political beliefs remain equally Indian.
A personalised nationalism gradually equates loyalty to the nation with loyalty to the government or leader.
The second makes opposition appear disloyal.
That is dangerous because democracies need legitimate opposition.
The strongest states are not those where nobody criticises government.
They are those where government can be criticised without criticism becoming a threat to the state itself.
India’s extraordinary diversity makes that especially important. It contains hundreds of languages and communities, several major religions, powerful regional identities and enormous ideological disagreement.
No single political narrative can plausibly represent all of it.
Indian democracy has survived partly because institutions provide ways for those differences to compete without requiring one side to disappear.
Federalism allows states to elect governments opposed to the centre.
Courts constrain executives.
Parliament contains opposition.
Media allow competing narratives.
Elections transfer political power.
Each institution preserves pluralism.
Censorship reduces one of those channels.
The question is therefore larger than whether this particular BBC documentary is good journalism.
I have not seen enough evidence to treat every claim in it as established fact, and the government’s objections should be evaluated seriously.
But that uncertainty actually strengthens the argument for openness.
If the documentary is weak, citizens should be capable of discovering that through criticism and competing evidence.
If it contains important information, citizens should be capable of discovering that too.
Government blocking prejudges the process.
It says the state should determine which information citizens are trusted to evaluate.
That is a paternalistic relationship between government and voter.
Democracy assumes something different.
Citizens will encounter misinformation.
Propaganda.
Partisan journalism.
Foreign narratives.
Government narratives.
Some will be wrong.
The solution cannot be constructing a Ministry of Truth capable of filtering everything before citizens see it, because the people operating that ministry would possess political interests too.
The alternative is messy.
Open information.
Independent institutions.
Media literacy.
Corrections.
Argument.
Courts where legal rights are violated.
Elections where political judgement occurs.
This produces more noise.
It also makes informational monopoly much harder.
That trade-off resembles the one I discussed during China’s white-paper protests. Authoritarian systems can reduce informational noise through censorship but create severe feedback problems because governments become less certain what citizens actually think.
Democracies accept more noise because disagreement itself contains information.
India should be especially careful not to sacrifice that advantage.
The country has enormous institutional strengths precisely because political argument has historically been so intense.
Indian democracy has never been quiet.
Parliament is noisy.
Television is noisy.
Elections are noisy.
Federal politics is noisy.
Protests are noisy.
That noise can be exhausting.
It is also evidence that political disagreement remains visible.
The danger begins when governments confuse silence with stability.
The BBC documentary may be unfair.
The government’s response may contain legitimate criticism.
Students screening it may have their own political motivations.
None of those facts changes the principle.
A democracy should be extremely reluctant to decide that citizens are safer knowing less about their leaders.
Political confidence should mean believing your argument can survive exposure to the other side’s evidence.
If the documentary is propaganda, demonstrate it.
If the historical record supports another interpretation, publish it.
If the BBC omitted relevant facts, make those facts impossible to ignore.
That response treats citizens as participants in political judgement.
Blocking treats them as its objects.
Perhaps that is the real issue underneath this controversy.
Freedom of expression is not primarily a reward given to people who speak responsibly.
It is a constraint placed on governments because governments cannot be trusted to decide perfectly which political speech deserves to exist.
That constraint can be frustrating.
It permits bad arguments to circulate.
It also ensures the government itself remains one argument among many.
India’s government has decided this week that the BBC documentary should not circulate normally online.
The immediate effect may be fewer accessible copies.
The political effect may be the opposite.
Millions of people who had never heard of the documentary now know the government does not want them watching it.
Sometimes censorship removes information.
Sometimes it adds the most interesting piece.
