As India Tries to Block a Modi Documentary, Students Fight to See It

Officials at a public university cut the electricity before a planned screening, and the government has prevented clips from appearing online.

Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s premier liberal institutions, gathered on Tuesday evening for a screening of a new BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But university officials had other plans.

They swiftly locked the entry gates at the New Delhi campus and cut off electricity in the winter chill, leaving the students to sit and watch the program on laptops and cellphones, their faces glowing beneath a blank projection screen. Then, just minutes into the viewing, which the students were holding in defiance of an order by the public university, they were attacked by a smaller group of masked men throwing stones.

The documentary, “India: The Modi Question,” focuses on Mr. Modi’s role during Hindu-Muslim riots that tore through the state of Gujarat in 2002, when he was its chief minister. The murder of a group of Hindu pilgrims at a railway station prompted a wave of mob violence in which about 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed, and perhaps 150,000 uprooted.

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