Indians Find Easy Workarounds to Watch BBC’s Banned Documentary on Modi
- Author: Adnan Bhat
- Full Title: Indians Find Easy Workarounds to Watch BBC’s Banned Documentary on Modi
- Category: articles
- URL: https://restofworld.org/2023/bbc-modi-documentary-workarounds/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
Highlights
- On January 21, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the sharing of a BBC documentary for “undermining the sovereignty and integrity of India” — and Indians have been looking for ways to watch it ever since. (View Highlight)
- Aman first tried watching the documentary on the Internet Archive, during the brief window before the video was removed for copyright infringement. But the slow buffering on the Archive.org site eventually pushed him to download the video file — which made it that much easier to share with his friends when he was finished. (View Highlight)
- “I thought I should upload the documentary on some cloud storage website and share that link with my friends, so they could download the documentary that way,” he ultimately decided. When the second part of the documentary aired, he uploaded both parts to WeTransfer and then shared the links on Reddit. (View Highlight)
- At least two universities have attempted to screen the documentary, only to be shut down by locals and university officials. In one case, power was abruptly cut from a hall where the documentary was being screened. But while public showings are vulnerable, private downloads remain relatively straightforward, as users share links through a combination of public file-hosting services and other channels. (View Highlight)
- He finally found the whole film on Telegram, where one group named “The Modi Question BBC Documentary” has grown to over 54,000 subscribers. There are at least three other Telegram groups with similar names, many of them renamed to capitalize on the newfound attention. (View Highlight)