Indian police detain students for screening BBC Modi documentary
Sign up now: Get insights on Asia's fast-moving developments
Mr Modi is accused in the documentary of ordering police to turn a blind eye to deadly riots while he was chief minister of Gujarat state.
PHOTO: AFP
NEW DELHI - Indian police on Friday detained students in New Delhi after stopping the screening of a BBC documentary on the role played by Mr Narendra Modi during Gujarat’s deadly sectarian riots in 2002.
The Delhi University students had followed those at several campuses around India in staging a broadcast, defying government efforts to stop its spread
Police swarmed the university after student groups supportive of Mr Modi’s ruling party objected to the screening, seizing laptops and imposing a ban on assemblies of more than four people.
Police officer Sagar Singh Kalsi told Indian news channel NDTV that 24 students were detained.
The two-part BBC programme alleges Mr Modi ordered police to turn a blind eye to deadly riots while he was chief minister of Gujarat state.
The violence began after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a fire on a train. Thirty-one Muslims were convicted of criminal conspiracy and murder over that incident.
At least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the sectarian unrest that followed.
The documentary quoted a previously classified British foreign ministry report which said the violence was “politically motivated” and the aim “was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas”.
The report also claims that the riots were impossible “without the climate of impunity” created by Mr Modi’s administration.
India has dismissed the series as a “hostile” propaganda piece and ordered big social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to block sharing or streaming it under controversial information technology laws.
Earlier in the week, the authorities at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University also banned an attempted screening and warned of “strict disciplinary action”
But defiant groups of students there and at numerous college campuses across India have gathered to watch the documentary on laptops and phone screens.
Mr Modi ran Gujarat from 2001 until his election as India’s Prime Minister in 2014; he briefly faced a travel ban by the United States over the violence.
An investigation team appointed by the Indian Supreme Court to probe the role of Mr Modi and others in the violence said in 2012 that it did not find any evidence to prosecute him. AFP
