The central government recently invoked its emergency powers to direct YouTube and Twitter to remove links to the BBC documentary which has been “selective” with the truth about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
But this isn’t the first time that BBC has earned the wrath of the Indian government.
Indira Gandhi when she was Prime Minister too cracked down on BBC for peddling propaganda.
The story behind Indira Gandhi banning the BBC for two years during the 1970s is quite interesting!
The BBC broadcast the UK premiere of Calcutta, a documentary film by acclaimed French director Louis Malle, on British television. The film, shot in and around Calcutta between 1968 and 1969, was by all accounts a visually rich, ‘impressionistic portrait’ of India’s second most populous city, and one of the world’s most intriguing socio-cultural centres.
Following a brief visit to Calcutta in 1967, Malle—who is now perhaps best remembered for films such as Pretty Baby (1978), the critically acclaimed Au revoir les enfants (1987) and Damage (1992)—had returned to India in 1968 and immersed himself ‘and his camera’ in the life of the intensely sprawling city. He concentrated on uncovering hidden existences within Calcutta; creating a sinuous visual narrative of the city in which people and street events became the subjects of the filmmaker’s attention.
Basically, he focused more on poverty than on the “working classes”. Of course, the Indira Gandhi government was not happy with this.
Speaking about "climate change", it appears that BBC threw away every shard of journalistic ethics, scientific principles, and what in this part of the world would be called as constitutional morality, to the warm winds coming from the melting ice caps.https://t.co/XQmRpeFKuN
— Pure Middle Class Kansara (@kansaratva) November 16, 2018
So, the Indian High Commission (HC) received complaints about the documentary being highly biased against India. It reached out to the UK Foreign Office (FO), which indirectly said they couldn’t interfere with BBC. The Indian HC asked the BBC to pull the documentary series from their schedule, and warned that their role would become superfluous if they continued to “vitiate the minds of the British people against India”.
Therefore, according to a research paper, on 29 August 1970, “the BBC was expelled from India by order of Indira Gandhi’s socialist government, under a hail of neo-imperialist criticism.” The BBC representative in New Delhi, Mark Tully, and correspondent Ronnie Robson were informed of the GoI’s decision to close the BBC office in the capital within the next 15 days.
Unlike now, there was near-unanimous political support for “taking the BBC to task” over their “anti-India sentiments”. A long series of biased coverage for years after Independence culminated in this ban.
The story behind Indira Gandhi banning the BBC for 2 years is quite interesting (see the link below).
In 1970, BBC broadcast Calcutta, a documentary by a French director, Louis Malle. Unsurprisingly, he focused more on poverty than on the "working classes".
GoI was not happy. https://t.co/EpbrMHC4AD
— Pure Middle Class Kansara (@kansaratva) November 16, 2018
The BBC had shown Dom Moraes burning his Indian passport (not surprised at all) during the 1961 Goa liberation movement. Similarly, their coverage of the 1965 war and the 1969 Ahmedabad riots (surprised there were riots before 2002) was “neither forgotten nor forgiven.”
In the 1950s while India had become a key player in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Pakistan signed the CENTO pact with Britain, the US, and others. This defined how the BBC would approach India, and their relationship with All India Radio (AIR), on which they depended a lot, soured.
In 1954, Stanford Univ. surveyed 42 exchange students from India out of which 41 listened to BBC (and obviously AIR). So Stanford concluded that the BBC was popular in India for its objectivity, truth-telling, and authority. Sample size, or a bad sample, is not a new issue. It was this reach of the BBC, even through regional languages such as Hindi and Bengali, that made the GoI monitor its content.
With the Cold War causing a geopolitical alignment between Britain, the US, and Pakistan, the coverage in the 60s was especially biased against India. The opposition to the ban on the BBC came not much from political opponents, but from the print media.
The Statesman, The Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and The Hindu all opposed the government move in what they considered as selective censorship and a blow to media freedom. Of course, there was the Soviet angle – for India was quite close to the Soviets.
The BBC re-entered only in late 1971, and its reporting of the 1971 war was one of the reasons. And then came the 1975 Emergency imposed by our former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Of course, it had to find ways to come to India
Besides, a statement was also signed in the year 1975 by 41 Congress MPs accused the BBC of broadcasting “notoriously anti-India stories” and asked the government “not to allow the BBC to report again from Indian soil”. The BBC never missed an opportunity to malign India and willfully misrepresent the country, the statement said.
14 August 1975: 41 Congress MPs signed a statement demanding ban on BBC saying, "BBC never missed an opportunity to malign India". pic.twitter.com/hXF9bLkLwC
— Facts (@BefittingFacts) January 22, 2023
(This article was originally published in News Bharati and has been republished here with permission.)
Click here to subscribe to The Commune on Telegram and get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.