OTT has become a bone of contention in Bharat. The Bharatiya movie industry has a censor board that oversees the kind of content that gets on the cinema screen. No matter how flawed the censoring procedure might be, it still exists. But no such mechanism currently exists for regulating OTT content. This has led to an alarming rise in content depicting nudity, violence, sex, and perversion. We have discussed in detail in previous articles how the OTT web series are increasingly not just becoming anti-Hindu but also distorting the Bharatiya middle-class family structure and its values.
Bharat is a huge market for the global OTT industry that has huge investments from American companies. The American entrepreneur and investor Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon is also the owner of The Washington Post. It comes across as no surprise then that The Washington Post would go out of its way in its attempt to preemptively thwart any attempt to regulate OTT content in Bharat.
A recent article published in The Washington Post alleges that Netflix and Amazon are backing down on “daring films” facing pressure in Bharat.
The article vociferously quotes Bharatiya filmmaker Anurag Kashyap whose visual adaptation of the non-fiction book “Maximum City” has been apparently shelved by Netflix owing to pressure from the BJP government and the Hindu right.
“But in 2021, Kashyap said, Netflix shelved what would have been his magnum opus: an adaptation of the nonfiction book “Maximum City”, which explores Hindu bigotry and the extremes of hope and despair in Mumbai”, says the article.
Then the article goes on to eulogize Netflix and Amazon about how they were apparently all set to revolutionize the movie industry, had it not been for the covert censorship of the Hindu right. Had this not been such a serious issue, one would be almost inclined to laugh as the article makes it sound like Amazon and Netflix are not money-minting private companies but revolutionary and avant-garde socio-cultural enterprises.
The article further alleges that Bharat’s BJP government and “its ideological allies have spread propaganda on WhatsApp to advance their Hindu first agenda and deployed the state’s coercive muscle to squash dissent on Twitter”. The OTT web series in Bharat have witnessed a lot of backlash and criticism from the public because of the glaring anti-Hindu content. The web series Tandav featuring Saif Ali Khan was the first such series to face widespread public anger because of its gross and insulting depiction of Hindu deities.
FIRs were filed against the series and the public pressure finally resulted in the makers of the series agreeing to remove certain objectionable scenes. But, according to the Washington Post article, the widespread protest and criticism that some of the web series are drawing from Bharatiya Hindus is not a sporadic reaction of the public, but rather an orchestrated attempt by Bharat’s supposed right-wing government to spread its Hindu ideology and control the good and innocent creative forces of OTT who are just trying to practice their craft.
The whole article is full of victim-playing tactics. There are repeated references to how public pressure campaigns and protests are apparently used as tools to stifle freedom of expression. How convenient it is to selectively interpret freedom of expression one wonders! If one goes by the logic of the article, freedom of expression is only the prerogative of the woke lobby filmmakers to push their poisonous narrative down the throat of the public, but the people of Bharat have no freedom of expression to voice their dissent. If they express their dissent and register protest against any of these web series, then they are apparently being misled by the right-wing government of Bharat. By giving this flawed argument, the article openly insults the audience. It implies that the audience is dumb, they have no agency or mind of their own, and they are just sheep to be herded by the left-wing or the right-wing.
Apart from filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, the article does not quote any other source. It goes on to say sensational stuff about the Bharatiya government’s alleged role in censoring OTT content. But it doesn’t provide any concrete examples or proof. The article claims that The Washington Post spoke to more than two dozen filmmakers, writers, producers, and executives in Bharat and the US and then adds that many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity. Saying sensational stuff without naming sources has become routine practice in woke journalism. The anonymous source trope exists to protect the identity of the people in dangerous cases. But the woke media has twisted this trope to present half-truths in front of the public. It’s rather convenient to say whatever you want to say and then attribute it to an anonymous source!
The Washington Post article also has problems with the system of self-regulation that the Bharatiya government introduced in 2021, post the Tandav web series controversy. A routine procedure asking the OTT authorities to resolve viewer complaints within a period of 15 days or else face scrutiny of the authorities, is made to sound like some kind of Orwellian dystopia for creative freedom. The stakes are high for OTT in Bharat with virtually free access to such a huge market; obviously, they would love the idea of zero censorship as it allows them to present the most sensational of content to reap further profits.
The timing of the article also coincides with the government proposing the Broadcasting Services(Regulation) Bill 2023 to regulate OTT content. The draft Bill proposes to consolidate the regulatory framework for various broadcasting services including OTT content. If the Bill is passed in Parliament, OTT streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix would no longer be able to enjoy a free ride in Bharat. The Bill proposes a model of self-censorship in which content evaluation committees would be set up to regulate OTT platforms.
The draft Bill is currently open to suggestions from the public. A slew of articles has already come up in the mainstream media lamenting the apparent loss of creativity and freedom of expression that this Bill will bring in, if it’s passed into law. The vitriolic The Washington Post article published a couple of days back seems like a part of the woke media toolkit to build sustained pressure on the Bharatiya government to either drop this Bill or dilute its provisions altogether.
Woke media would have you believe that Bharat is the only country in the world trying to regulate OTT content and that all good Samaritans are giving a free hand to OTT content. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The European Union has a rather detailed code to regulate OTT platforms. It’s not been endorsed by all European countries, but Europe overall, has some sort of a regulatory framework to regulate OTT platforms. Australia also regulates OTT players through a complaints-based system. Singapore too, has a stringent framework to regulate OTT content. In Singapore, OTT players are required to classify their content on the same criteria as offline films. But the likes of The Washington Post seem to have no issues with the OTT regulatory framework of any of these countries. But Bharat trying to regulate OTT content is being portrayed as some kind of a conspiracy to throttle freedom of expression.
As the OTT consumer base in Bharat rises sharply, it’s natural that the next logical step would be to regulate OTT content. Why must web series have some sort of privilege over offline movies? On the contrary, the need for their regulation is even more urgent since OTT content can be surfed by anyone having a subscription from a mobile device. This makes children and teenagers extremely vulnerable to the sexually explicit and violent content being doled out by OTT.
As Hindus in Bharat become more conscious and aware of the anti-Hindu tropes and stereotypes being conveniently propagated through web series, one will see more and more complaints against these series. That’s why the global woke machinery is now desperate to put pressure on the government of Bharat in a desperate bid to save OTT in Bharat from regulation.
Washington Post Article link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/20/india-netflix-amazon-movies-self-censorship/
