Over 300 retired judges, former bureaucrats and retired armed services veterans released a statement on Saturday criticizing the BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “delusions of British Imperial resurrection” which they said was “overwhelmingly” accountable for the “Hindu-Muslim tensions”.
“So, now we have the archetype of British past imperialism in India setting itself up as both judge and jury, to resurrect Hindu-Muslim tensions that were overwhelmingly the creation of the British Raj policy of divide and rule,” said statement signed by senior government officers, judges, and veterans.
“Not only is the BBC series, judging from what we have seen of it so far, based on delusional and evidently lopsided reporting, but it presumes to question the very basis of the 75-year-old edifice of India’s existence as an independent, democratic nation, a nation which functions according to the will of the people of India,” said the statement.
The signatories further said, “yet again, the BBC’s staple, dyed-in-the-wool negativity and unrelenting prejudice towards India have resurfaced as a documentary, India: The Modi Question.” Former Rajasthan High Court chief justice Anil Deo Singh, former home secretary L C Goyal, former foreign secretary Shashank, former RAW chief Sanjeev Tripathi and former NIA director Yogesh Chander Modi are among the signatories to the letter.
BBC’s ‘India: The Modi Question’: Delusions of British Imperial Resurrection? Not this time. Not with our leader. Not with India. Never on our watch,” they said.
“Regardless of whom you, as an individual Indian, might have voted for, the Prime Minister of India is the Prime Minister of your country, our country. We cannot allow just about anyone to run amok with their deliberate bias, their vacuous reasoning.... “ .
This is demonstrated, it said, vividly by its completely sidelining the core fact that the Supreme Court of India has unambiguously ruled out any role of Modi in the Gujarat riots of 2002, rejecting allegations of complicity and inaction by the then state government headed by him.
The statement alleged that the BBC series reeks of motivated distortion that is “as mind-numbingly unsubstantiated as it is nefarious”.
The signatories also lashed-out at BBC film for saying that Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was unfair to Indian Muslims though they said CAA had “nothing to do with Indian Muslims”.