Last weekend, the Indian government ordered YouTube to remove clips from a BBC documentary. It sent a similar order to Twitter, telling that platform to remove any tweets that featured links to those clips and pointing to more than fifty specific posts that had done so. The documentary, called India: The Modi Question, covers, in part, a series of violent riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. More than a thousand people died—most of them Muslims. The documentary features quotes from UK government correspondence that described the riots as having had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing” and held Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible.” Modi is now India’s prime minister.
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