The story of the other India

Of late, English language newspapers in the United States and Britain have been covering India from two very different perspectives. One angle adopted is to tell the Indian story that would please the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and Narendra Modi, the party’s president. Modi has already served as the country’s prime minister for almost ten years and is very likely to get another five-year term after the elections to be held in 2024. He has been promoting the idea that India is now a global power. It is the leader of what Modi has begun to call the Global South for the countries that were once said to belong to the developing world. He has used his foreign travels and the visit of foreign leaders to India to convey the idea that his country is now a big player on the global stage. He was encouraged to think that way when he made a state visit to Washington and was feted by Joe Biden, the American president. Biden looks to India as a country that would work with the United States to contain the rapidly rising China. Under President Doanld Trump, America felt threated by rising China, a fear inherited by his successor Joe Biden.

The other story the western media is now telling in detail is the rise in India of authoritarian governance based on the principles that draw upon Hindutva, the philosophy that is meant to guide people and the governed that represents. Hindutva has its roots in old Hindu texts. Modi’s political party follows the teachings of Rashtriya Sevak Sangh, RSS, a party founded in the 1930s in the image of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany. It has led Modi and the BJP to downgrade non-Hindus in the country to a secondary status. Of particular concern for Pakistan sitting in the area northwest of India is the state of 200 million Muslims in India. They make up the third largest community of the followers of the Islamic faith, after Indonesia and Pakistan.

The Washington Post coverage of the other India was carried by the newspaper on the front page of the paper’s December 6, 2023, edition and then devoted two full pages inside the paper. It was written by Gerry Shih and Anand Gupta and carried the title: ‘With dissent under fire, streaming giants bend’. The streaming giants covered in the story are Netflix and Amazon Prime. Both entered India seven years ago, promising to shake up one of the world’s most important film and TV markets with more than one billion people and homegrown movie-making industry with worldwide focus. The worldwide market is made up of the large Indian diasporas in Britain, North America and the Middle East. These diasporas are estimated to number 9 million are peopled by those who are hungry for products with Indian themes.

“In the past four years, however, a chill has swept through the streaming industry in India as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, tightened its grip on the country’s political discourse, and the American technology platforms that host it,” wrote Shih and Gupta. “Just as the BJP and its ideological allies have spread propaganda on WhatsApp to advance their Hindu-first agenda and deployed the state’s coercive muscle to squash dissent on Twitter, they have used the threat of criminal cases and coordinated mass public pressure to shape what Indian content gets produced by Netflix and Prime Video.”

The trouble for foreign owned streaming devices began in 2019 when Hindu extremists resorted to boycotts and filed police reports against Netflix and Prime Video seeking to curb content that was viewed as insulting Hinduism and India. The campaign against the foreign content producers peaked in January 2021 when police across India was persuaded to investigate Prime Video for producing a political series called Tandav which was viewed as mocking a Hindu god. A top Prime Video producer in India was forced to go into hiding and surrender her passport so that she could not leave the country.

Sunil Ambekar, a senior leader and spokesman for the RSS, explained the government’s approach towards the film and streaming industries. He said it was the duty of filmmakers to promote a positive image of India and its culture. “Movies that celebrate Bharat are more liked by the people, using the Sanskrit name for India. These days we can see pride for nation, pride for India, more actively addressed.” According to a senior official, the goal was not to squash criticism of the government or ban discussion of the India’s social and religious rifts but mostly to curb profanity and sexual content. But the harassment of those involved has gone much further. A good example is the treatment of Aparna Purohit, the head of India continent at Prime Video, who came under attack by OpIndia, a right wing news site that promotes Hinduism in the country. It dug into her Facebook history and found that she had posted political cartoons criticising the government and accused her of “giving space for ultra-left radicals and Islamist elements” on the streaming platform she managed.

Shih and Gupta in the coverage quoted above wrote: “In January 2021, the campaign against streamers came to a head. Prime Video released a series under the title of Tandav, viewers in nine states filed complaints with the police. The coordinated complain alleged that the cast and crew of Tandav had insulted a Hindu god in one scene. But Tandav riled BJP supports in other ways: It also depicted police brutality against student leaders and farmer protests, mirroring real life controversies that had been dogging the Modi administration.”

Modi government’s sensitivity to content in the movies produced by some of the well-known moviemakers took a heavy personal toll. One of those who suffered was Shagari Kashyap who spent a lot of time filming Maximum City based on a book on Mumbai that had won a great deal of acclaim both inside and outside India. Kashyap had written and filmed three parts of the story told in the book. The series was produced for a foreign company which pulled out of it after receiving information that the government would not be happy if it was shown. Netflix and Prime Video may have dropped Maximum City but are not quitting the country. They are in India to capture the market of 1.3 billion people with 9 million outside in various diasporas.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2023.

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