New Delhi Students Push Back on Documentary Ban
Telling someone not to do something and ensuring they don’t do it are two different, and at times contradictory, acts.
India banned a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, called India: The Modi Question, which critically examined the then-Gujarati chief minister’s role in the 2002 riots in that state. Sharing video clips of or links to the documentary on social media was banned, too (the Intercept reported that Twitter, despite CEO Elon Musk’s professed free speech absolutism, is indeed complying).
But students at Jamia Millia Islamia—a majority Muslim university in India’s capital, New Delhi—planned a screening of the documentary; dozens were detained ahead of it. Shortly before this happened, elsewhere in the capital, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, power was cut Tuesday night to try to stop the film from being shown.
The university, which had asked students not to screen the film, did not immediately respond to reports alleging it had cut the power. Some JNU students have also said they were attacked. In any event, after the power went out, students passed out QR codes so that their peers could watch the movie on their phones and laptops. The JNU students’ union, apparently undeterred by the power cut, has already said it will organize another screening of the film.
These two universities have previously been sites of protest against Modi and Indian authorities. In December 2019, Jamia students protested the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law many criticized as discriminating against Muslims; police were reported to have stormed the university campus. In January 2020, JNU students accused police of failing to intervene when assailants heard to be yelling Hindu nationalist slogans violently ran through their own campus.
They are far from the only ones in India watching the documentary. The Students Federation of India in Kolkata’s Presidency University asked to screen the film. And, ban or no ban, political groups in the leftist-led state of Kerala are pressing play and showing the documentary.