BBC is no stranger to controversies: A look at its journey in India

Days after BBC’s documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots came out, the Income Tax Department conducted ‘surveys’ on the broadcaster's India offices, sparking a major political row in the country and triggering international discussions on press freedom in India.

However, this is not the first time that the BBC has found itself in a soup in India.

Here we explore the history of the BBC in India.

The 1922-founded British Broadcasting Company (it became a Corporation in 1927), popularly known as BBC, stepped into India in 1932.

BBC had expressed interest in expanding to India in 1924, just two years after becoming operational, but the British government in India did not accept its then-general manager John Reith’s request. Almost a decade later in 1932, BBC launched its English-language Empire Service on shortwave radio worldwide, establishing its presence in India in the process.

Also Read | Income, profits not commensurate with operations in India: CBDT on I-T survey on BBC

In May 1940, BBC launched services in Hindi and eventually expanded to Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Tamil. Now, it produces content in Nepali, Punjabi, Telugu, and Urdu and its Delhi Bureau is one of the BBC’s largest news operations outside London.

Before the 2023 I-T ‘survey’, BBC India had two episodes when it had to briefly shut its operations here.

BBC documentaries published in the 1970s, named Calcutta and Phantom India, showed India in a poor light and then-PM Indira Gandhi briefly expelled the organisation. The documentaries received backlash from the Indian diaspora in the UK too.

Phantom India was a French miniseries that was directed by Louis Malle. The Indian government found the documentary to be focussed only on underdeveloped regions instead of showing development in the country.

Director Malle was also accused of focusing on poverty, slums and rituals in his other documentary – Calcutta. It sparked a debate and gathered the attention of Oscar-winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who questioned Malle’s intentions.

Decades later, BBC India was banned in April 2017 by the Centre for filming documentaries on India's tiger reserves, after the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) criticised it for “grossly erroneous” reporting. The NTCA also recommended blacklisting BBC’s South Asia correspondent, Justin Rowlatt, for his documentary which mentioned government’s “ruthless anti-poaching strategy” in the Kaziranga Tiger Reserve. The Centre subsequently issued a five-year ban on BBC, prohibiting it from filming in India’s national parks and wildlife sanctuaries for “irreparable damage done to India’s reputation".

Recent evidence also shows that controversies have marred the BBC’s reputation: as per the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022, trust in BBC News has decreased from 75 per cent to 55 per cent in the last five years, with most of this distrust in BBC coming from the right of the political spectrum.