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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, a lot of the documentary is a mixture of interviews and CCTV camera footage with a fairly even handed narrative on the top – it, by itself, isn't that shocking and certainly isn't presented in a particularly sensationalist way. I'm amazed by the reaction it has generated. Yes, there's some post-colonial history there and it doesn't look great that it's the BBC that has made it, as opposed to, say, a US or continental European broadcaster. Still, nevertheless, when you see videos of policemen beating up (usually female) students with canes because they've had the audacity to protest, it can't help but make you think.

If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here: [1] and searching for "India: the Modi question" will most likely provide it elsewhere.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dkb144/india-the-mod...

View on HN

> If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here

And if you happen to be belong to the rest of the ~99.13% world population, you can grab it here:

    Episode 1 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2Fannounce

    Episode 2 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:F55992F922B9A0E49C09E198835F0F06EE07635B&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E02+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2Fannounce

Ha there is no way that 99% of the world population know what to do with those links / hashes / whatever they are.

You'd be surprised.

They'll have ChatGPT sort it for them.

perfect

https://i.imgur.com/unlePgu.jpg

That's true, but if they know/learn, they will be able to get it, one way or another, and they don't have to be in the UK :)

Maybe not, but the subset of the 99% that are on HN are far more likely to know what to do with them or how to find it out.

But a lot of them will be able to find out if they care to learn.

They'll obviously have better luck with them than with BBC iPlayer, for which they would need the knowledge and ability to set up a British VPN.

And lie about holding a valid UK TV license.

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.

Agree. I don't want to use a free VPN, and I don't want to oay for VPN. I also want to own my copy.

are you perhaps a teen? that's a magnet link, its used to transfer things via bittorrent. we used to put them in the spokes of our bicycles when we'd ride down to the five-and-dime

When I was riding bikes to the store we had dialup and floppies were giving way to CDs.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers.

Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.

How does one get malware from playing a .mkv or .mp4 video file?

A sophisticated attacker could make use of bugs in the player to hack the system. This sort of trick is often used against high value targets where the effort needed makes it worth it.

Why do I feel like the people downloading ConAir(1997)YIFYWEB-DLs.MKV are not high value targets?

Why does the video player have the capability to do anything other than read video files the user specifies through the system file chooser dialog and play them on the screen?

Because playing them on the screen involves demuxing audio and video, decoding audio and video, usually using two different but complex codecs, some which have extensive capabilities and features (think multilingual subtitles, interactive menus, etc etc). Oh surely your video player should allow you to pause and play with a remote control, right? More code surface. We probably need an ability to check for updates. And so on and so on.

But even without anything more than open, decode, play - anywhere a vulnerability exists could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs. Applications shouldn’t be updating themselves at all; that’s the job of the operating system’s package manager.

Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a video player to be able to access files arbitrarily or connect to the internet or log keystrokes in the background or anything else! The only reason they can do this is because we haven’t built operating systems with all this in mind, apart from mobile OS’s that is.

neither video/audio decoders nor demuxers nor subtitle format parsing/rendering have OS APIs. hell, there's at least a few ways you can draw a rendered frame to the screen on any OS that will take different paths through either the OS's drawing APIs (if you're not on Linux) or graphics drivers. Even _if_ the OS supported taking video file data and playing it, it wouldn't support all of the codecs/containers/subs you'd want to play.

> All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs.

"Standard APIs" isn't some silver bullet to never have any security vulnerabilities. There can absolutely be vulnerabilities in "standard APIs".

ffmpeg is a pretty standard media utility, and it gets lots of CVEs. Decoding complicated media is complicated and often done in unsafe languages in attempts to squeeze more performance.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-3611...

With Qubes OS I don't have to care what a video player does, since it's isolated in a hardware-virtualized VM.

overflows

No, what I’m asking is: why does the operating system allow the video player to do anything other than what it needs to do to play videos? If the video player suddenly starts trying to access files on its own (anything not explicitly chosen by the user through system file dialog) or trying to access the internet then the user should be prompted to give permission.

We have this kind of API permission (capability) system on phones. Why can’t we have a really fine-grained one on desktops? It’s like a firewall for APIs.

both of those examples happen within normal usage

file system for finding external subs (or like, playing the video)

internet for streaming

and then oh look, it has the permission

Many times these kinds of attacks are buffer overflows, tricking the hardware/OS to execute code it wasn't intending. Its not just that the media player starts to behave strangely, often the attack corrupts code outside the media player. See the Android Mediaserver vulnerabilities, or many of the buffer overflow vulnerabilities in ffmpeg.

If an attack corrupts how the OS checks permissions, it doesn't matter if you've got some API framework for calls, it broke out of it.

The ux you are describing is a lot worse than what people get with vlc or mplayer. For example, you can open videos from the cli, which means there is no file chooser involved. Also if you have a subtitle file (.srt) with the same name as the video you opened, the subtitles will automatically be added. Both of these are things people want as part of a versatile video player.

The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.

On the other hand something like pledge would be useful here, since the attack vector is untrusted files, not untrusted applications. With pledge, the application could open any files, then relinquish the ability to open new files before parsing the contents.

I expected this response. I think it's a false equivalence. We don't need to have a proprietary locked-down operating system like iOS in order to give the user full control over the capabilities an application has access to. We just need a standard API for handling these sorts of permissions.

Granularity is usually the problem here. It is very difficult to fully specify the full set of things you expect a program to be able to do. Even if you could, it is not usually something an end-user will want to do, due to the verbosity involved. Permissions are also time / sequence dependent. If you have something that can specify the user's expectations fully, it will be very verbose due to the inherent complexity, so the system will either be unused, default to overly broad permissions lists, or rely on trusting various pre-baked recipes that others have made. At that point I'm not sure how much you have gained for the average user, and it seems you lose some very real usability in the process.

Curious to hear how you would go about solving this problem. It seems that there is just a lot of inherent complexity here and I can't see any way to avoid that complexity without preventing the system from being useful.

Decoding the video involves hardware acceleration, so data is not just processed at the application layer, it's passed much deeper. In very specific and rare attacks, it's been possible to bypass application and even OS level protections by crafting media files. So that when they're processed there's an overflow which dumps some payload into unprotected memory and allows some intrusion into the viewers system. This has been done with photos, general images and videos.

It's not reliable unless you happen to know the specific, unpatched exploit on the target system. There aren't general purpose vulnerabilities for such things.

There would need to be an unpatched vulnerability in your player that the file exploited. Only virus I ever got was from an mp3 file that exploited the vulnerable version of winamp that I was using because I hated the newer version.

Most of the time it’s a rar file that contains screenshots, album art, thumbnails, etc. not just a video file. I’ve been burnt a decade plus ago when I automated some extractions into a media folder on an old windows laptop. By the time I noticed, it was deep in the registry and near impossible to remove. It was something akin to MacKeeper malware on Macs, I don’t recall the old windows malware names.

With my Usenet automation I’ve never had the issue in about 9ish years but it could happen. I pay a usenet provider and indexer a low fee to rid myself of torrents and seeding.

This is a really good talk I saw in person on this exact subject. Focuses on using rust and the nom library for safe parsing. He opens with a description of how VLC is one of the worst offenders for vulnerabilities historically because it supports so many different file formats / parsers written in c.

> Safe and fast parsers with Nom and Rust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mA5ZwWB3M0

Media decoders are often rather complicated and often involve parsing data directly into large and constantly changing memory buffers. A huge chunk of Android vulnerabilities have been from vulnerabilities in media libraries, even JPEG parsing has been known to lead to vulnerabilities in Linux.

There's a really good explanation in the book "A Bug Hunters Diary".

It used an old version of vlc and a buffer overflow vulnerability to get code execution.

What do you use instead? IPFS isn't very practical compared to Bittorrent I find.

Which Usenet service do you use?

There's no malware risk from trackers lol...

I've not torrented in at least a decade, and I don't remember seeing magnet links inline in text like that.

Certainly don't miss those hours of waiting for an ISO to download only to find it's all corrupt, or a record label plant, or a handheld recording of a cinema screen...

> Certainly don't miss those hours of waiting

I think you mean 2 decades. I haven't waited an hour for anything to download since I used to grab bootleg concerts that were very poorly seeded in the early/mid aughts.

Some of us rural nerds are only recently coming off the dialups

Depends on how rare the linux isos you're interested in are.

They are pretty obviously magnet links, which are used for torrenting. I expect lots of people are familiar with them.

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.

There seem to be so few seeders that it's stuck at 5% for me.

You might want to check if your router/firewall/ISP blocks/throttles torrent traffic, I'm seeing 173 seeds and just 18 peers (for the first part), it should quickly go up to full speed.

Apparently it struck too close to home.

Unleashing tax officials on an organization painting a negative picture (well, not, Modi and accoplice paint it, the BBC only presents it) is a failed attempt of masquerading an authoritarian government overstepping their limits of governance. If they were honest and not coward they would simply tell: 'Shouldn't uncover our dirty laundry, get out of here or will get hurt!'

They only highlight not cover this way what we already suspect of India being an elective dictatorship (similar to Hungary).

> Unleashing tax officials on an organization painting a negative picture (well, not, Modi i and accoplice paint it, the BBC only presents it) is a failed attempt of masquerading an authoritarian government overstepping their limits of governance.

Isn't that what every government do? Remember that Al Capone went to jail because of tax issues, the government couldn't prove anything he was accused to.

If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.

Almost every government has a history of unleashing a tax department on their political enemies. We call it a legal state when it happens in our country, and a state terror when it happens in another.

A cynic in me would say that, in this case, India is learning from the best democracies in the world, US and Germany.

EDIT: I'm not saying Al Capone did not do tax evasion, or that Ballweg had all his books 100% clean. In any remotely complex tax system, it's not even possible, since there is always enough place for interpretation. But the fact that some guys are prosecuted just because government doesn't like them, and the ones that government likes get away with it, is unfortunately properly of almost every legal system, democracies included. In the end, Modi's government may find a lakh or two of expenses not filled properly and punish BBC with 20 krores.

My point is just that this is not unique to India, and one should not look down at India and call out on it for doing what everyone else is doing.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-conservative/just...

> The U.S. Justice Department has reached a settlement with dozens of conservative groups that claimed the Internal Revenue Service unfairly scrutinized them based on their political leanings when they sought a tax-exempt status, court documents showed.

Capone was guilty of tax fraud because the money laundering part of his criminal enterprise was the part that was the least well organised. Nothing wrong with that. Somehow I doubt the BBC is laundering billions in bootlegging money.

I don't know anything about the German guy.

The BBC office in Delhi at the Hindustan Times building employs 200+ people, including many UK staff on temporary attachment. It massively expanded in 2016 but it dates back far longer.

I wouldn't be confident that every piece of equipment in that office was obtained legally in the country, let alone being able to prove it. For example someone whose mobile phone got lost/smashed/blownup last time they were in Kabul, so they bought a new one, then returned to their Delhi office. Or a piece of equipment that was legally imported back in 2012 but the paperwork has gone. Or a UK purchased harddrive that a passing cameraman left in the edit suite, or something bought locally but the receipt didn't list the serial number on it.

I'm confident there will be an "irregularity" somewhere. I'm confident any office in any building in any city in the world will have similar problems irrefutably proving where any equipment came from.

"For example someone whose mobile phone got lost/smashed/blownup last time they were in Kabul, so they bought a new one"

How is that related to the BBC?

> How is that related to the BBC?

I think iso1631 is saying that there may be enough red tape for imports into India that the BBC could technically be breaking the law for failing to declare/pay duties on some equipment they or their employees brought into the country.

If you're in the US, my experience is that it's kind of an anomaly in terms of relatively light enforcement of import taxes for individual citizens. For example, most countries will look at the declared value on foreign parcels and force the recipient to pay import tax before releasing it to them.[1] If someone walked the same thing over the border, and the government wanted to make things hard on that person, they might accuse them of tax evasion, etc.

[1] For those NOT in the US wondering how this is unusual, individuals generally don't have to pay before receiving the parcel here.

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.

The BBC provides journalists with phones to do their job, be that a live broadcast using something like LU-Smart, or just getting their emails on the road.

Any object within their physical premises would be ultimately their liability if no one else steps forward to claim ownership.

Or at least that's how the law works in a lot of countries.

I don't know about a lot of countries, it doesn't work this way in Germany for sure.

So then who is liable if some dangerous substance is discovered within a company's office in Germany? Or if someone gets hurt by a normal object placed in a peculiar position?

Assuming the perpetrator is unknown.

There is an investigation (for that we have the police) on how it got there and who is responsible and if something illegal (determined first by the prosecution office and then determined by a court) was going on.

And if the perpetrator cannot be found?

Who pays out for the damages ultimately?

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.

Okay so my point stands?

The company is always ultimately responsible for whatever is discovered on their premises by default.

> 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?

"As the raids are underway, documents were seized and phones and laptops of journalists were taken away. Employees were asked not to call anyone."

If those phones were bought out of country there may be tax implications

I understand, but looking for one tiny irregularity for political goals is not the same as jailing a mafioso for it who is a money launderer and murderer on a huge scale.

I was arguing with the OP that Capone's sentence was not political but this thing is.

The German guy is a right-extremist who wants to topple the German state and takes donations from followers. There are investigations for fraud and money laundering for around $150k.

He is in jail because of increased flight risk as he cleaned out his house and was trying to sell it.

The highest German court is currently deciding if his jail time is too long already.

>Isn't that what every government do? Remember that Al Capone went to jail because of tax issues, the government couldn't prove anything he was accused to.

Yes to varying extends and with varying frequencies. No government is perfectly clean in this regard though some are much better than others. Comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions will happily write of their own governments small amount of it though because that's more comforting than realizing we do it too and having the tough discussion of where the line ought to be.

Please dont troll with generalizations.

A little to close to home, eh?

Twisting the law so you can jail a known criminal for a term that is unreasonable for the charges you can actually convict him on is surely a far cry from jailing political opponents over BS but it is on the same spectrum of odious government behavior and the fact of the matter is that HN types tend to draw the "here is where I stop looking the other way" line on that spectrum a lot closer to the "jailing dissidents" end than people who have adversarial contact with such institutions.

How does this help the point you are trying to make?

> doesn't stop comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions

It comes across like a prejudiced assumption, and just hurts it. Flames others into an incendiary mess. Why are you so mad, who is it towards? Westerners? Dungeons and dragons of all things has been dealing with these ethics surrounding laws for years. Games. Your anger is misdirected at "hn types" because that is just a generalization.

Regardless, your principle stands. The ends justifying the means as a principle is despised for good reasons even if some laud it as well.

> Isn't that what every government do?

The question should rather be: Is this a good thing or abusing the power?

(Al Capone did tax fraud on a spectacular level, among other more serious offenses. BBC shown a documentary. Feel the difference?)

Also: billion flies eating shit will not make it a good thing. :/

Bad habbit should be a repelling thing not something be repeated and brought forward as excuse for gods sake!

(I cannot tell if the above examples for abuse are founded or not, except Al Capone, my response is for this 'other do so I will too' kind of derailed rhetoric or alibi that I hate so so much)

> Almost every government has a history of unleashing a tax department on their political enemies

Financial crimes tend to be a lot harder to hide than bodies, and the witnesses (in the form of records) harder to bribe.

FDR famously weaponized the IRS, as his daughter even remarked on it,against his enemies including politicians and political opponents like Huey Long and Mellon (the former Treasury secretary and potential future Presidential candidate and innovator of the “modern” IRS).

“My father,” Elliott Roosevelt observed of his famous parent, “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

https://www.hillsdale.edu/educational-outreach/free-market-f...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon

> My point is just that this is not unique to India, and one should not look down at India and call out on it for doing what everyone else is doing.

Nobody is claiming that India's corruption is unique or unprecedented, just that it is happening. Germany and the US have done a lot worse than selective prosecution, and it would be better if India did not do those other, worse things.

"It's all right because the US and Germany did it" gives you slavery and death camps.

Al Capone was not a "political enemy" of the state. He wasn't prosecuted "just because the government didn't like him." He was a mass-murdering crime boss.

> If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.

I think you have that backwards.

Ballweg is in jail because allegedly he took in donations to support a cause, but then (ab)used them for himself personally, defrauding the donors and evading taxation. That's illegal, and thus he's in jail.

Indeed protesting Covid is not enough to put you in jail, because that's not actually illegal. You're insinuating the government chose to persecute him for his political views. That's a pretty bold claim that I think would need substantiation.

Modi is scared of BBC otherwise he should have banned BBC like RT.com in the West.

This is a terrible analogy. RT.com is a reliable purveyor of conspiracy theories and incendiary lies. The BBC's examination of Narendra Modi's well-documented behavior leading up to, during and after the Gujarat riots is well-supported by other media and academic sources.

Haha, a truly objective analysis of both media conglomerates with no a-priori biases would show that the BBC is just as reliable a purveyor as RT.

I don't think so, I don't think it is fear. I have watched BBC for a long time and they were uniformly critical/negative of everything in India. Other than one or two positive series, their news have been uniformly negative and so obviously biased that I've stopped watching them.

Personally, given the amount of negativity that they have thrown around, I'm glad Modi gave them the shock treatment - I think they have earned it and in spades.

And just in case this is seen as a pure BJP persective, Indira Gandhi had also done so long ago and that straightened them out for a while.

I think a better question is, "Who is causing this reaction?".

As in, who is the person who cannot bear this and is it because the ego is being bruised, or because it portrays India in a certain manner?

Maybe some of these world leaders should consider therapy seeing as they can't handle their own problems by themselves and rather punish people around them for it.

I think the point might actually be to remind the public what Modi did (or didn't do), which was and is very popular in India as abhorrent as it is to the West. He can't openly brag about it but he can make sure everyone remembers before the next election by making it such a huge story. Bonus if it stirs up tension at the right time

It's called realpolitik; and the rest of the world should be calling it like it is.

Modi may be able to brush off the English as patronizing assholes who have no right to lecture India on anything; but that doesn't change the fact he's playing by a Hitler-lite playbook, and speedrunning European rhetoric circa 1930-1945, with the serial numbers filed off.

The British/Irish and the Troubles, the Germans and the Jews; it's really not that hard to perceive the direction things are being steered. That the rest of the world is not more openly hostile to this type of atrocity is more frightening to me than anything else.

But eh, "India's problem, and we have bigger fish to fry". Mark my words: this won't be the end, and the ensuing bloodshed will be a stain on the state for many years to come.

People like this are why we cannot have nice things.

Another victim of the Streisand effect. Modi's reaction to the documentary has done far more damage than just the documentary by itself. It's like the BBC released this doc and Modi's government is giving it free marketing worldwide with the outsized reaction.

This would have been just another docuseries on the BBC had they not reacted like this. Now everyone is sharing links and wanting to see what the fuss is all about.

> Another victim of the Streisand effect.

Oh no. The Streisand Effect is so '90s.

Current political operatives the world over, particularly conservative/nationalist ones, have since learnt to weaponize Streisand - they stoke polarization on relatively minor arguments, in order to foster a siege mentality where everyone is forced to declare whether they are "with us or against us". This solidifies their support and makes the opposition look vague and unprincipled.

This is a line that goes all the way from GWBush to Berlusconi, Modri, Orbàn, Trump, Abbott, Turnbull, Erdogan, Salvini, and Johnson.

Modri wants this to be a big thing, precisely because it allows him to play the victim against "evil and corrupt colonialists bent on keeping India down". As policies go, it costs effectively nothing and has great propaganda value.

>policemen beating up (usually female) students with canes because they've had the audacity to protest, it can't help make you think.

Tbf, having seen the COVID lockdown footage of how they would beat up even larger businessmen in suits with their canes, I can't say I am surprised.

It is quite an insane sight for anyone outside the culture.

In Punjab, during Covid lockdown Police made people crawl on all fours on national highways for violation of curfew orders. Assaulted people with lathis (cane-charge, another colonial rule legacy). And then newspapers here write every year about infamous "crawling order" passed by Gen. Dyer before the Jallianwala Massacre.

Imagine saying "post-colonial history" about a massacre done by Hindu revivalist movement started and benefited most from the colonial times. This "post-colonial" term has been weaponized by RSS-BJP and plays to their advantage now. Imagine if they can raid BBC offices, what happens to normal press corps.

Curious to know why you think the BBC should be exempt. The head of the BBC is in hot water for arranging a loan for the then British PM, Boris Johnson.

What post-colonial narrative does BBC spew? If you see BBC regional languages programs, you will see that it platforms RSS-BJP's Hindu Nationalistic rhetoric to a far greater degree.

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.

In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns.

I don't think even a cursory look at the history of Europe in the last few hundred years bears that out - you can probably start at the peace of Westphalia and keep going to the current war in Ukraine. The connection to white nationalism is not specious, it's precisely because it's a form of ethno-nationalism.

> My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.

Now you've got me curious ....

Bangladesh used to be East Bengal. Through a series of demographic changes, it became East Pakistan in 1947 and then Bangladesh in 1971.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember the 1971 war of independence; I was wondering about Rayiner's surname that he mentioned as having migrated from the Middle East. (I could hazard a guess ....)

Just to be clear: Razib Khan makes the connection to white nationalism, not me. It happens that Razib Khan is himself probably a racial supremacist. But I didn't even have pull any of this in from Khan's background; it was in the article you chose to cite.

It's not so much Western notions of what liberal democracy should look like, but rather the Western notion that liberal democracy is superior/sacrosanct.

"Liberal democracy" has a very specific meaning — or at least, it has to, or else there's no common language to describe these things. What India is engaging in is objectively not liberal democracy, it's illiberal democracy[1], but that can be okay. The fact that "illiberal democracy is bad" is the Western notion / post-colonial imposition on an independent India.

I personally disagree with most Indians, and tend to prefer liberal democracies, but that's my Western notion (and I say that as an ethnic Indian that went to high school in India, but has settled down in America).

[1] Poland, Hungary, and arguably Turkey are also notable examples of increasingly illiberal democracies

I agree with your framing. Good point.

What are you talking about?

I'm asking why you think the BBC should be exempt from scrutiny like any other organisation.

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

Authoritarian leaders/movements always respond to criticism by attacking the people doing it.

“Some post-colonial history there” is quite an understatement.

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