ISLAMABAD: Questions are being raised over the silence maintained by the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak on the ongoing raids by tax authorities on the offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Delhi and Mumbai in the wake of a documentary that exposed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the Gujarat state.
Questioning the British Prime Minister’s silence, Ashok Swain, an Indian origin academic and writer and Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at a Swedish university in his comment made on the Twitter said, “Rishi Sunak still silent on Modi’s raid on BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai. Is he really the PM of the UK?”
It is worth mentioning that Rishi Sunak defended Narendra Modi in the British Parliament by saying that he disagreed with the characterisation of his Indian counterpart in the BBC documentary. Sunak had made the remarks while responding to Labour Member of Parliament Imran Hussain during the Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) session in the House of Commons earlier in January, this year.
The raids on BBC offices in India come weeks after fascist Modi’s government banned the documentary – titled ‘India: The Modi Question’ – that examined his role in the anti-Muslim riots in 2002 in Gujarat, where he was chief minister at the time. The documentary also revealed for the first time an unreleased UK government report that said the events had all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing. The report said Modi was directly responsible for a climate of impunity that led to the anti-Muslim violence, and that he had ordered senior police officers not to intervene.
The Indian government banned the documentary, authorities moved to stop screenings and restricted clips of it on social media in a move that critics branded an assault on press freedom. The BJP government invoked emergency powers under its information technology laws to block the documentary. Twitter and YouTube complied with New Delhi’s requests and removed many links to the documentary.
Notably, the raids on BBC offices have been condemned in India as well as by global rights bodies.
