Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in India have claimed that they were attacked with stones for watching a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's role during the deadly 2002 Gujarat riots, when he was chief minister of the state.
The attack was carried out on Tuesday after a power and internet outage at the campus halted the screening of the documentary, reports scroll.in.
The university administration cut off the power to stop them from watching the documentary, which has not been officially screened in the country, the students alleged.
Vice Chancellor Santishree Pandit said that there was a major line fault.
The engineering wing is looking into the issue as even the faculty residences and other facilities are without light, said the VC.
Meanwhile, stones were thrown at students who were watching the documentary on mobile phones and laptops.
Some students claimed that members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a right-wing student organization affiliated with the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, carried out the attacks.
Earlier, the Indian university banned the screening of the BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's role during the deadly 2002 sectarian riots, after his government attempted to block its spread online.
The broadcaster's program alleges that the Hindu nationalist Modi, premier of Gujarat state at the time, ordered the police to turn a blind eye to an orgy of violence there that left at least 1,000 people dead, most of them minority Muslims, reports AFP.
While the documentary has not been made available in India, it has been uploaded on several YouTube channels and shared widely on Twitter.
Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi had planned to screen the documentary on Tuesday, defying efforts by Indian authorities to restrict its showing.
But a memo from the university's registrar late on Monday ordered students to cancel the event and warned it would take strict disciplinary action if its edict was disobeyed.
"Such an unauthorized activity may disturb peace and harmony of the university campus," it said.
On January 20, the Indian government used emergency powers available under the Information Technology Rules, 2021, to issue directions to YouTube and Twitter to block clips of the documentary from being shared.
The foreign ministry has described the documentary as “a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative”.
The 2002 riots in Gujarat began after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a fire on a train. Thirty-one Muslims were convicted of criminal conspiracy and murder over that incident.
The two-part BBC documentary cited a previously classified British foreign ministry report quoting unnamed sources saying that Modi met senior police officers and "ordered them not to intervene" in the attacks on Muslims that followed.
It also said the violence was "politically motivated" and the aim "was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas".
The riots were impossible "without the climate of impunity created by the state government... Narendra Modi is directly responsible," it concluded.
Modi ran Gujarat from 2001 until his election as prime minister in 2014 and briefly faced a travel ban by the United States over the violence.
An investigation team appointed by the Indian Supreme Court to probe the role of Modi and others in the violence said in 2012 it did not find any evidence to prosecute him.
