: BBC – Who is afraid? #WorldNEWSAll The BBC’s motto, adopted in 1927 is ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’. Let them deliberate on whether they adhered to this motto when it broadcasted

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BBC – Who is afraid? #WorldNEWSAll
The BBC’s motto, adopted in 1927 is ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’. Let them deliberate on whether they adhered to this motto when it broadcasted the Modi Question.
Rajiv Gandhi was somewhere in West Bengal when the Intelligence Bureau alerted him about the assassination of his mother and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His first impulse was to check the veracity of the report by tuning into the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He believed the report only when he heard it on the BBC. He flew into New Delhi to be sworn in as prime minister.
Mark Tully was the BBC correspondent in New Delhi. He enjoyed a cult status that no other radio journalist ever obtained. I was a regular listener to the morning bulletin of the BBC that had an in-depth analysis of the main event, sometimes with spot interviews. It helped me to attend the editorial conference at the Hindustan Times and, later, at the Indian Express, where editorial subjects were discussed and finalised.
In other words, the BBC was my window to the world. To give the devil its due, I learnt this technique of being one up on my colleagues from none other than the legendary editor and historian Khushwant Singh, who began his day, listening, not to Gurbani but the BBC.
A few years ago, BBC Television telecast a documentary that focussed on the Great Bengal Famine, a recurrent theme in Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen’s books and articles. In his autobiography Home in the World (Allen Lane), he describes the situation in Kolkata and Shantiniketan, where he was staying at that time with his maternal grandfather and Sanskrit scholar KM Sen when the poor died of hunger.
Sen squarely blames the British rulers, especially war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for the death of at least three million people. The BBC underlined what Sen and many others had been saying that the deaths could have been averted had food-grains been made available to the needy. The TV channel did not shy away from calling Churchill as the villain of the piece.
Nobody in his right senses would say the BBC documentary was an example of the channel’s “colonial mindset” or dub it as “propaganda”. Nobody in Britain objected to the documentary which helped the viewers understand what happened in Bengal in 1943 when the British were lording it over in India, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, which were a part of an empire where the Sun never set.
There have been innumerable instances of a BBC documentary raking up a controversy as, for instance, when it did one on the Falklands War and when it critically examined the “greatness” of Margaret Thatcher. Christians were upset over a documentary which gave credence to the fanciful theory that Jesus spent a few years in Kashmir.

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