The film goes back to Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat and the pogrom against Muslims in the year 2002. In short, the BBC has Miss Havisham’d the picture and done damage where it may have intended to do good. The BBC in effect took India’s best activists, writers, and journalists who are pulsating, alive, and dynamic, and clipped them together into flat, repetitive tropes that make them look as if they’re standing still. This allows the regime in power to use the films for one more round of propaganda – painting themselves as victims and using the critique from the left to serve their own saffron end. I could go on.ĭespite having interviewed the best voices and people who are still unafraid to say what they think, the BBC stitched them together in a way that said nothing new and is therefore guilty of painting a tired, wan picture of the same facts regurgitated in the same way. And Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the best-known academics researching and writing profusely on the Hindu right. Siddharth Vardarajan, one of my favourite journalists and the founder of one of the last standing independent press spaces. Aakar Patel, the activist and India chair of Amnesty International, fighting the good fight relentlessly. Arundhati Roy, the writer who has never minced her words. It also had a glittering cast of characters from the liberal left – people I have always and will always admire and hold up as my heroes. The documentary was sold in advance to an expected subversive audience like myself as a pathbreaking investigation that would bring to light new information and show us something we had not seen before.

Revati laul the anatomy of hate