Ratings for BBC Documentary About Modi Are Better Than Some Disney+ and Netflix’s Shows: Report

It is a fool’s errand to think that in this information age, banning media of any kind will prevent people from accessing whatever they are interested in. Even powerful totalitarian regimes cannot entirely prevent their citizens from working around censorship.

It is, therefore, not surprising that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s ban on BBC’s unflattering documentary “India: The Modi Question” has not prevented scores of Indians from watching it one way or another.

If fact, as is always the case, a governmental ban raises popular curiosity and entices even the disinterested. That’s what happened when the then-Rajiv Gandhi government banned the sale of Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1988. The otherwise boring tome became a bestseller in the black market. It appears that history has repeated itself, this time as a farce, with the BBC Modi documentary. The ban has only force multiplied the curiosity of Indian audiences, as it were.

Global analysis firm Parrot Analytics ranked “India: The Modi Question” amongst its top 10 ‘global breakout shows’ outside the U.S. for the first week in March, the most recent week for which it has data, Deadline website reported.

Despite the international uproar that the ban and other efforts to scuttle its spread in India, the Modi government has doubled down on its efforts, even so far as going after BBC India through tax raids on its offices and reportedly intimidation of its personnel.

According to the report, the consumption data tracks viewing across YouTube, social media and includes piracy, which Parrot Communications Manager Wade Payson-Denney said is “particularly relevant in this case as the content was banned in India.”

“The significant global demand suggests that Indian consumers worked around the ban,” he told Deadline. Since the ban was initiated, opposition parties and student bodies across the country hosted watch parties, helping in efforts to circumvent the official efforts.

Parrot’s metric, apparently places the two-part documentary “amongst big budget offerings such as Disney+ Hotstar’s “The Night Manager” and Netflix’s South Korean drama “The Glory.” It is amazing to think that a controversial political documentary can rival the ratings of entertainment content.

The documentary, according to The Guardian, “revisits allegations from two decades ago, when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat. It was during this time that 60 Hindu pilgrims were killed when their train carriage was set alight. The cause of the fire was disputed but the Muslim community was blamed and it set off a wave of bloody retaliatory violence, with Hindu mobs targeting the homes of Muslims across the state. More than 1,000 people died in the riots, most of them Muslims.”

While most of what was depicted in the documentary is well-known to Indian audiences, its most explosive revelation, according to the Guardian report, was that the documentary obtained access to a previously unseen and confidential UK government report produced after the riots that found Modi responsible for the violence and described the riots as having the “hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.”

Despite the international uproar that the ban and other efforts to scuttle its spread in India, the Modi government has doubled down on its efforts, even so far as going after BBC India through tax raids on its offices and reportedly intimidation of its personnel.

An appeal against its ban is pending in an Indian court and will be heard later this month.