Despite Nationwide Ban, Indian Viewers Are Finding Ways To Watch BBC Narendra Modi Doc

Max Goldbart
Updated ·2 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: The BBC’s controversial Narendra Modi documentary may have been banned in India but local viewers are still finding ways to watch it, according to analysts.

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.

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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.

Parrot’s metric gave The Modi Question a market multiplier score of 14.7, meaning that, for the week to March 3, the show had 14.7 times more demand than the average show worldwide across all platforms. This metric places it in amongst big budget offerings such as Disney+ Hotstar’s The Night Manager and Netflix’s South Korean drama The Glory, and Parrot put much of this down to viewing in India.

While The Modi Question is only available in full on the UK’s BBC iPlayer, clips of the show on social media and YouTube have been banned in India. This is mainly due to the focus on coverage of Modi’s management of riots when he was Chief Minister in Gujurat in 2002, when a suspected Muslim mob set fire to a train carrying Hindu pilgrims. The incident sparked one of the worst outbreaks of religious bloodshed in independent India and Modi has been accused of failing to do enough to stop the riots. He was exonerated by a Supreme Court inquiry in 2012 and a petition questioning his exoneration was dismissed last year.

The doc has been called “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage” by the Indian government and sparked protests by dozens of members of Britain’s Indian diaspora outside BBC New Broadcasting House in January. In the UK, it was watched by a consolidated audience of around 650,000 people, according to Barb data from overnights.tv

An appeal against its ban in India was lodged around the time of the protests and will be heard later this month.

The Indian government, meanwhile, has tried to have the BBC banned in its entirety, which was thrown out, while, in mid-February, the BBC’s offices in Mumbai and New Delhi were raided by income tax authorities.

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