Monitoring Desk
NEW DELHI: Indian police on Friday arrested students in New Delhi after stopping the screening of a BBC documentary on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role during the deadly sectarian Gujarat riots in 2002.
The students at Delhi University had followed many campuses across the country in staging a broadcast and defying government efforts to stop its spread by blocking its publication on social media platforms.
Police swarmed the Delhi University after student groups supportive of Narendra Modi’s ruling party objected to the film’s screening, imposing a ban on assemblies of people and seizing laptops.
Police officer Sagar Singh Kalsi said that 24 students had been detained so far.
The two-part BBC documentary alleges that Modi had ordered police to turn a blind eye to deadly Gujarat riots while he was chief minister of the state.
India unrest over documentary screening
The violence began after 59 Hindu pilgrims died in a fire on a train. Thirty-one Muslim community members were convicted of criminal conspiracy and murder over the Gujarat incident.
At least 1,000 persons, mostly Muslims, were killed in the unrest that followed.
The BBC documentary quoted a previously classified British foreign ministry report. The report stated the violence was “politically motivated” and the objective “was to remove Muslims from Hindu-dominated areas.”
India has dismissed the documentary as a “hostile” propaganda piece and ordered major social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter to block its sharing or posting under controversial information technology laws.
Earlier this week, the administration at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) also banned an attempted documentary screening and warned of “strict disciplinary action” if the order was ignored.
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But defiant students there and at several college campuses around India have gathered to watch the BBC documentary on phone screens and laptops.
