Tax raids at BBC offices in India enter second day
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34787782 - Feb 2023 (374 comments)
The indian government can continue tracing and find the scammer to get their money back (hard), or just shut down the call centers (easier).
Yes, I know this isn't the way international disputes work right now. But I think the US is in a position to make demands like this, with the threat that US borders will be closed to indian nationals, goods and investment unless india pays up.
Repeat however many times are necessary to solve the problem.
No it wouldn't. India is still tiny economically compared to the US and the global economy. They have a $3.x trillion economy; the US is seven to eight times larger. Maybe in another 25-30 years they'll get to a $10t economy (in today's USD).
> The US is already testing its limits trying to go against Russia and China simultaneously
The US isn't testing its limits at all re Russia. We're not even breaking a sweat yet (we're hardly making an effort at industrial scaling just for military purposes for example). We're using our vast logistic machine to ship Ukraine weapons to defend itself, and they're doing most of the hard work. The US is using a few single digit percent beyond its normal pace for the Russia vs Ukraine war. We're not mass producing war machines just for that purpose for example; so far it's largely logistics/shipping/intel and modestly boosting a few types of ammo that Ukraine particularly needs. The US also has plenty of help from its NATO (and other) allies on sanctions and weaponry, which makes it that much easier on the US (not having to go it alone).
Russia is just that mediocre.
The Wall Street journal headline from yesterday "To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast" https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/cpi-report-today-january-20...
It's one thing to ban a politician if you can show they're profiteering from a scam call center but it's another to ban them just because there are scam call centers. Literally all I think you should have to do is show they're supporting them before you can do some sort of adverse action. But you do need to have proof first ...
When Piyush explains why those DCOM errors in event log are super super important it brings a little joy to my heart
I mean this raid seems like it might be motivated by something other than just enforcing their tax code, sure. But you didn't bring that up. And I'm having trouble seeing the connection between this and scammers.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/it-raids...
You could write books about everything that is wrong with my country (many people do) but independent journalism is sacrosanct.
It's the same reason why election fraud in the US or Europe gets coverage when it's just a couple votes, but Russia's elections don't get much coverage. Everyone knows Russia's elections are a joke, but someone getting arrested for voting their deceased relative's ballot is unexpected.
It's not a measure of importance, it's a measure of newness.
Obviously they don't think why they want to be a "superpower" when we still don't have clean water and our air is getting worse (literally unliveable by global standards)
You have people like Margarita Simonyan calling for violence against Ukranians, Anton Krasovsky calling for the murder of Ukrainian kids, etc.
Has the BBC done anything like that in the past, say, 50 years?
If the Indian government have a legitimate complaint against the BBC they should do the same.
This is harassment, designed to intimidate, without providing an actual (valid or not) reason, or being an actual sanction.
The Russian state propaganda outlets operating abroad stopped being even slightly press-like a long time ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/ho...
https://peertube.tv/search?search=The%20Modi%20Question%20&s...
iplayer is how you get free access in the UK to BBC because residents pay the TV tax for it . Rest of the world you pay for it in some way as part of cable deal , subscriptions etc, or BBC decides to make it free or ad supported .
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Keep in mind BBC is no different than aljazeera it is state sponsored and is import part of soft power toolkit of the UK government uses
this doesn’t mean they are wrong or biased in anyway on the Modi documentary nothing in it is new or not widely known , for example until he became PM he was blocked from getting a U.S. visa for his role in the riots .
BBC content can be good like aljazeera (especially for non Qatari /ME content) can be but the inherent politics of it cannot be forgotten or ignored
There was gonna be absolutely no impact whatsoever if they had just kept quiet and not said a thing.
Instead their touchiness has meant that this has become a much bigger deal and is actually impacting their favorability negatively, at least anecdotally.
You make a milquetoast documentary about things I did a decade ago that were pretty bad, GTFO!
"No you're a puppet, you are you are"
It's just pathetic. How does anyone look at these people and think they are strong?
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If India really tries to go down the internet censorship rabbit hole, its probably not gonna go well, as they are decades behind more seasoned despotic regimes.
Hell, in the US, 10% should probably be sufficient.
As a first pass, you don't even need to block general-purpose platforms like reddit and Twitter and Facebook, you just need to kill the centralized sources of political information.
The point of this exercise isn't a full on repression of all dissent, it's just shifting the political window to topics and mouthpieces that are friendly to you. Most people have mainstream opinions, and if you tilt the mainstream landscape towards you, by driving your opponents into high-friction underground echo chambers, a first past the post system lets you turn a close election into a landslide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTV_(Russia)#Change_of_managem...
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-tops-list-of-most-po...
I mean, India has a great thing going. Geopolitically, it's exempt from bans on trading with Russia, so it can play both sides and get away with it. It has build up a vast services industry as the "back office of the world", a major driver of economic prosperity. It's likely the main beneficiary of re-shoring manufacturing out of China.
In this position, quite literally the dumbest thing you can do is to attract international attention by attacking a western institute like the BBC.
You weaken your position in geopolitics. You scare investors. You don't realize how unlike manufacturing, services are extremely easy to move to another country. And why even start manufacturing in this regime, when plenty of saner countries are nearby?
You want to gamble with all of that, for what? A BBC report that does nothing. Give it no attention and everything stays exactly the same.
Namely: Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Japan.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/27/apple-shi...
A lot of India's electronics manufacturing at the moment is still limited to recycling (e.g, Sony Trinitron CRTs)
You have it backwards. This is the stuff that manufacturers, and particularly capitalist American manufacturers go absolutely nuts for. Authoritarian governments are their wet dream. If you have an authoritarian govt on your side, there's nothing you can't get away with. Labour troubles disappear, red tape? gone! Environmental issues? swept under the carpet.
It doesn't get much more Authoritarian than China, and world manufacturing moved all moved there over the past 50 years.
The attraction is that it's cheap, nothing else matters. If it were cheap whilst the country was democratic, we'd still take it. So authoritarian is not the requirement, being low cost is. That said, yes it's a fair point that cheap correlates with an authoritarian regime with lax regulation. But it's not the only reason for being low cost, it can also be a result of a surplus of labor and the lack of an internal market.
Regardless, the recent insight is that moving all manufacturing into a superpower with nukes that changes alliances at a whim might have been a mistake. Hence another sizable country like India behaving unreliably isn't exactly looking attractive as the next destination.
https://www.politico.eu/article/majority-of-western-companie...
Why would a comparatively insignificant transgression like this raid scare off investors?
Here is the documentary, why not watch it and see what you think about their reporting?
What name-calling? I called the regime incompetent. Not India's inhabitants. I have no bias against Indian people, if I do, it's a positive one. 90% of my team is from India.
India is on a path to being a totalitarian state. One that will normalize ethnic cleansing of minorities, "re-education" of those who can't be eliminated and a state that strips away your fundamental rights especially if you belong to the minority.
The short term India is busy growing its nationalistic ambitions at all cost. The long term India is Akhand Bharat which will attempt consolidate Pakistan (even at the cost of nuclear war), Bangladesh and Nepal all into a single country.
Schadenfreude: it seems India are ready to dig themselves into a hole. This should benefit the West on the long run.
Is no one willing to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, Modi is par-for-the-course among leaders in the sub-continent ?
Modi seems to be called an authoritarian more often than actual authoritarians. It is fair to criticize Modi for divisive politics & hard nationalism, but he is very much a democratic leader. The party has accepted any defeat graciously and within the bounds of what's permissible within the system. If anything, compared to the Gandhi family leaders that came before him, Modi has been remarkably non-authoritarian. (Doesn't mean that he meets the requirement for an ideal ethnical democratic leader, but then who does?)
Multiple things can be true at the same time. Modi's response to the Gujarat riots was incompetent enough that it will remain a black mark on his legacy irrespective of what he achieves afterwards. At the same time, the BBC seems to have timed this documentary curiously close to the Sunak's rise as the new conversative leader, and therefore the new target of the UK's left leaning media houses. Especially because the documentary does not seem to bring any new facts to light.
I personally find the documentary and the west's general approach to Hindus (and right wing politicians everywhere) to be a little hypocritical.
Hindus (and Indic peoples) have been persecuted for a good few decades in every neighboring Muslim country. Indian law privileges minorities more than any other country in the world. Modi's policies plus statistics seem to indicate no particular deviation in terms of treatment of minorities as compared to prior govts. If anything, his poor-first effective socialism policies help the poorest in society first, and Muslims being the most underprivileged, benefit immensely. India is a better country to be a Shia Muslim in than the neighboring Muslim nations, and that speaks volumes about the tolerance and freedom that underlies Indian and Hindu-majority society.
The criticism of Modi is welcome, but it does seem especially slanted. Modi has the distinction of being one of the only major world leaders to be banned [1] from the US, all while people with proven-genocide records continued to welcomed in this country. Modi gets called a right winger despite being more socialist than most anglo-phone leaders. Policies widely supported by the west are considered authoritarian (ex: farm bill) the second any group protests against Modi.
The most annoying thing is that Modi has a lot of problems. His economics involves too many freebies. He has no spine, and will recall great policies the second any small group in India complains. He relies too much on the infamous Indian bureaucracy & he has yet to find spiritual successors to close confidants that have passed away due to unfortunate situations (Swaraj, Jaitley)
The English-media continues polarizing Modi on elite-urban-left vs Hindu-nationalist grounds, and he keeps playing into those tropes. That's because Indians are nationalists [2] irrespective of religion & Hindus still perceive themselves as 2nd class citizens in their own nation. The removal of article 370 was a massively popular move. Making fun of his English, religiousness and lack of elite-manners only feeds into his humble everyman image. You are feeding him easy wins.
If only the Indian opposition was competent enough put forth a competent leader.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_people_banned_...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/nationalism-...
Are you blind to the rising incidents of violence against minorities that has dramatically increased under Modi or are oblivious about the fact that a mosque was razed by his party only to build a grand temple there?
'Hindus (and Indic peoples) have been persecuted for a good few decades in every neighboring Muslim country.' - Where are the facts? Quotes like these without facts mean nothing.
'The removal of article 370 was a massively popular move' - not for the people who were actually impacted by this. Who still do not have a legitimate election or government. Is Kashmir a part of Democracy? What happened to the state government?
I am surprised that educated people still support Modi. It echos well with the growth at all costs story. Every country that has a majority which considers itself as the victim resorts turns towards Facism and Modi is leading us there really quickly.
Look how they did Trump and his cronies.
BBC TV licence goons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jljn8YI1_GQ
Perhaps the British police could be used to crack down on the grooming gangs.
It's very sad to see people everywhere turning off their brains just because their government was criticised.
1. BBC was sent a notice for tax evasion 2 months before this documentary was released - the fact that they are being raided now could be a reaction to the doc or maybe just a coincidence. No org is above the law, so being raided for tax evasion is business as usual.
2. The documentary doesn't cover the reason as to why the riots happened, it'll take nuance and understanding of the past 800 years history of islamic invasions to realise that it was not a one off incident.
2. You want a 2 hour documentary that covers who did what, who did it first, back it all with believable proof, and also cover 800 years of nuance, interpretations, opinions... yeah, good luck with that. It's not going to happen.
There are indications of what happened and how some didn't do anything to stop it from happening. Pointing this out isn't an attack on India or Indians (there's a difference between you and the government/politicians). It is what it is, no need to be so defensive.
The funny thing is that no one really cared about this until the Indian government decided to censor it (why?) and presented it as an external attack (well, now I'm interested!). They decided to make a big deal out of something than only they actually cared. Now apparently the BBC is the "most corrupt organisation in the world" (to quote a BJP spokesperson) and raids are needed because, of course, "no one is above the law".
Be it India or another country, this is bad and shouldn't be defended or encouraged.
Have you not seen riots happen in London few years ago, or the black lives matter, or so many others in the past. To use you own argument, why did they not stop it immediately? Because it takes some time and effort to control it when large populations are involved.
And nobody is asking to cover all the history, Nuance can be covered with small hints and by giving little bit of background. Otherwise People who dont know India's history only see what they see in the documentary and go on making up their mind.
Plus BBC is funded by UK government's so its essentially a mouthpiece for them. So Independent journalism is not really expected from them anyways.
I was living in London in 2011 when the riots happened. There was no parties/movements inciting anyone to kill/expel/hate a different group. The police killed one guy and that was the outcome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Mark_Duggan . Of course you can't stop this immediately, but you can stop people from spreading hate and stop yourself from associating with said people.
The documentary... honestly, no one cared about it. Maybe many Indians did care, but Indians should know that background. No one made a big deal outside India because usually people don't care that much about happened on the other part of the world (do you?). Anyway, how do you go from this to censor the content?
Most of BBC funding comes from a TV license paid by people with TVs, not from the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
Now, I'm not going to say that they're the most independent and serious source in the world, but they went after the Tony Blair government (centre-left) in the 2000s, criticised the following conservative governments, and as you can see, the government doesn't like them that much: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/17/governments-at...
In any case, I really don't like media censorship or governments that go after people who criticise them or selectively apply laws. For me it's wrong.
But to answer your question, the documentary and its timing is the result of a UK report created by the UK consulate after the riots was made public within the last year or so because UK law requires such documents to be made public after a certain amount of time.
Finally, Modi being acquitted in an Indian court of law doesn’t mean innocence. Even ignoring any questions of corruption, etc, India does not have one of those legal systems which decides whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. India’s court system only decides whether someone can be proven guilty.
An acquittal simply means that one cannot be proven guilty, not that they are innocent. The not guilty verdict can also be the result of a lack of evidence (which was the case in this situation), or due to procedural mistakes, etc. which may lead to an acquittal even if someone is guilty.
It's not what I come to HN for, in fact the lack of news is one of the reasons I come here.
The complete balkanization of India is about to happen and I don't think the rest of the world will be able to cope with the number of refugees.
Anyways! Can you cite a non-pseudo source for you claims?
I found it interesting that Indians for some reason like to insist on this absurdity. There must be some benefits or advantages of making such claim.
source : me an Indian citizen who grew up in one of the southern states.
I think the secular south would've been able to come to that conclusion before now; I already thought of Modi as a religious nut who was (at very least) highly complicit in the Gujarat violence. I'm a bit skeptical that this BBC documentary will be what breaks up india.
This is a bizarre characterization of the awareness of the situation in India. Modi was blamed for the riots right from the beginning by every politician outside his alliance, including in South India. Modi's alleged guilt has been paraded before the voters in every election, big & small, national or local, since 2002. It has been one of the primary national political issues in India ever since, including a very well publicized court case that made its way through the Supreme Court. Even if it was a sham trial, it's bizarre to suggest that people in South India were somehow unaware of Modi's alleged guilt - till this documentary.