The latest on threats to freedom of expression around the world
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Friday, 17 February 2023
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Narendra Modi has banned a new BBC documentary about him and has ordered the BBC's offices to be searched. Photo: BBC
Last November we received a tip-off. Narendra Modi was moving to commandeer one of India's remaining independent media outlets. A journalist friend-of-a-friend, who was critical of Modi and worked at the outlet, feared for their job. Would we like to speak to them? The answer was, of course, yes. We had been discussing in the Index office for some time about how we'd like to increase our India coverage and this was just the push we needed. We decided to focus the first issue of 2023 on Modi's India. We started to dig and were alarmed by what we were discovering. Then came the BBC documentary, The Modi Question. What it revealed alone was disturbing. But it was Modi's response to it, which saw the Indian government go out of its way to block viewings and then, just this week search the BBC offices ([link removed]) in New Delhi and Mumbai, that made us realise just how crucial it is to scrutinise the leader. Our issue will be out in April
([link removed]) , and we've made some invaluable connections on-the-ground, so expect a lot more from us. In short, Modi we're watching you.
Heartbreaking news continues to come out of Turkey and Syria, where the death toll from the earthquakes has now reached 41,000. Our contributing editor, Kaya Genç, has written in The Times about the role played by corruption in Turkey under Erdogan. He says ([link removed]) : "The catastrophe has reminded any Turks who might have forgotten why it is unacceptable that urban planners and architectural experts are locked up while the property developer cronies of the government call the shots." As per our report ([link removed]) last week, these hard truths are being met with harder pushback - critics of the government's role in the earthquakes has seen journalists and academics ([link removed]) arrested and detained. It's no better across
the border, as Syrian journalist Rizik Al-Abi reports. He writes for Index ([link removed]) on how Bashar al-Assad is using the disaster for his own political gain. Those particularly affected are from an opposition region of the country. Aid is not forthcoming, while Assad is spinning images to tell his own story.
We are approaching one year since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin continues to punish all those who dare to question his "special operation" line. Case in point: on Wednesday a Russian court ([link removed]) sentenced ([link removed]) the journalist Maria Ponomarenko to six years in prison for a Telegram post about a Russian airstrike in Mariupol, which killed hundreds. We're fortunate at Index to not just hear the bad stories though and so we wanted to end this newsletter with something positive. Last year our summer edition featured a poem from Yulia Fridman, which was part of the Kopilka Project, a new, extraordinary repository of anti-war poetry by Russian speakers around the world. Back then the Kopilka Project was an outline collection, but today it has found physical form in a book, Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-war Poems. You can
read more about the book here ([link removed]) and the Project itself here ([link removed]) .
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** CCP tentacles in Europe's heart of democracy
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[link removed] a lot of the hoopla the past few weeks has been on what China is doing up in the skies above Canada and the USA, our primary concern is still firmly rooted on the ground. In this case in Athens, where back in October 2021 activists gathered at multiple locations to protest China’s hosting of the Olympic Games - and were promptly arrested. They've all since been released and the charges dropped against some, but not all. Read our article ([link removed]) on this curious and concerning case.
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** From the archive
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** Conspiracy of silence
Ai Weiwei
Autumn 2009
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Following the devastating earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei started a campaign investigating why so many schools had collapsed. Like Turkey, corruption translating into shoddy building regs was at the heart of the issue. And like Turkey, the authorities didn't much like what he was saying and tried to stop him. We published one of his censored blogs ([link removed]) .
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