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BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

theguardian.com

381–390 of 425 posts

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'd never heard of it until it was blocked on YouTube. It's totally on the map now.

This makes as much sense as the infamous perspective "Nixon can't be president; nobody I know voted for him".

I really think that outside of the UK very few people would have heard of it if it wasn't for all this.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised by just how many Modi (and right-wing) supporters exist among influential Indians in the Silicon Valley. They're not even subtle about it on Twitter.

Modi is relatively popular among Indian Americans. Less popular than people in India, but more popular than you’d expect given Indian Americans’ voting patterns: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/02/09/how-do-indian-ameri... > The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the most popular political party among Indian Americans. One-third of respondents favor the ruling BJP while just 12 percent identify with the Congress Part…

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Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western notions of what liberal democracy should look like (multi-cultural, multi-religious, etc.) is a colonial imposition on India: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

"Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have been courting allies against their Leftist antagonists, which sometimes results in strange connections to Western white nationalists", writes the Taki's Magazine contributor. Perhaps in this one instance, the West's notion of what liberal democracy should look like is correct. Not every idea the liberal west has is, but the alternatives to these two ideas are horrible.

The connection to white nationalism is specious. Everyone in this story is brown. The differences are about beliefs and culture, not skin color.

It also projects western circumstances onto places where it doesn’t make sense. Multiculturalism is a cultural adaptation to America being a post-colonial, post-slavery, immigrant nation. In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns. The moral connotations are very much tied up in the fact that those other cultural groups are in western countries because of the stuff western people did that wasn’t so nice. That doesn’t have any force when you’re talking about Hindus in India or the Japanese in Japan. Indeed in India it probably cuts the other way. My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two parts appear to be on Rumble [1][2] It seems that yt-dlp [3] works with Rumble so you don't even have to visit the site. [1] - https://rumble.com/v26y14s-india-the-modi-question-part-1-by... [829.13MiB via yt-dlp] [2] - https://rumble.com/v271ob0-india-the-modi-question-part-2-by... [341.35MiB via yt-dlp] [3] - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.git

What is this website rumble? Never heard of it

Prompted by weaksauce9s comment below I did one google and found a WIRED article:

https://www.wired.com/story/rumble-sends-viewers-tumbling-to...

Seems a justified concern, please consider vouching that comment.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the job of supporters. They are supporters. What kind of reasoning is this?

The job of supporters, is to suppress other people? Sounds unhealthy.

Huh? The "other people" are "suppressed" by "drowning out" because it is a democracy and they are not in power? Because most people support a government doesn't mean the "other people" are being drowned out by suppression?

What a ridiculous and dishonest line of argument you have presented here. Just because you are not a supporter of a democratically elected government doesn't mean you are being drowned out and suppressed. If that were the case you would have disappeared like they do in China. What a hyperbole.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany the guilt has to be proven by the prosecution and you need to be sentenced by the court. If this can't be done, no one is hold accountable. If something stolen is found in an office, and the company has nothing to do with it, the company is not held responsible for the theft.

What if something actually dangerous, like sticks of dynamite, is discovered in some office?

Probably the building is evacuated and the dangerous thing secured by specialists E.g. a bomb squad.

Then the same thing. The police and the prosecution find out if this was illegal, if the possession is illegal, who possesed if and who brought it and why, then who is responsible and a court decides if someone is guilty. The court will decide if the company is responsible E.g. because of negligence, they might not have implemented the law, educated their employees etc. In the case of dynamite that an employee brought, the company is not responsible, there might be terrorism charges against the employee.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how is the BBC responsible for their employees buying phones and bringing them in the country? Was the BBC telling their employees to do this? It wasn't the employees home raided but the BBC office.

> Yes, but how is the BBC responsible for their employees buying phones and bringing them in the country? Was the BBC telling their employees to do this? Well yes

The BBC told their employees to buy phones outside India and told their employees to not pay taxes?

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were right at first, but with commercial VPNs constantly be advertised as a way to get around content restrictions, I wouldn't be surprised if more people understood a VPN than a torrent these days. Assuming they're willing to pay that is.

"Understood" is different from "can afford" and "has the ability to purchase," and definitely different from "will subscribe to an otherwise useless British VPN in order to watch two hours of television."

Most such VPN providers have servers on multiple location. UK is very popular location so just connect to it if you already paid for VPN. I think some people already paid for VPN as I can see YouTuber's ads.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#389
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by no means is it an authoritarian state The linked article would indicate otherwise? I think one's standards of democracy have to be fairly low, to not see that Indian state is at least proto-authoritarian. From what I can see, India is doing pretty badly in most indicators, be it democracy indices, HDI, employment (The usual response to this from Right wing is that these are "western indicators", and the governme…

I saw the video the day it came out. Its an OK video, but I question the timing in wake of the upcoming elections and Modi leading the G20. Typically I don't call out "ejection e manipulation" or "external interference", but I'm increasingly starting to suspect the intentions of the BBC (and other media) The metrics you mention are not poor, but our data is poor. Furthermore, numerous research shows HDI and GDP are f…

"I question the timing in wake of the upcoming elections and Modi leading the G20"

So, at which phase of various intersecting elections and global obligations does the sweet criticism window open? (Note that the elections are upcoming in 15 months.)

IMHO a PM of the largest nation on Earth should be able to weather criticism night and day. People responsible for 1,5 billion souls cannot claim sanctuary against the press. And if Modi's domestic results are as impressive as other HNers claim, there will be no risk of him losing an election from a BBC documentary that the vast majority of the voting population won't ever see.

Re: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

#390

Not sure why the offices have been raided, corruption in Indian offices are not new, just because they are the BBC does not make its staff immune. The show itself adds nothing new in real evidence that can be taken to court, however there is a serious risk it create communal disharmony. Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event, Indians see it as stirring the pot just before the 2024 elections.

"just before the 2024 elections"

Elections are in 15 months, so the election cycle is in three quarters right now. That is not "just before elections", much like 9 pm is not "just before midnight".

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