Facing pressure in India, Netflix and Amazon back down on daring films
Facing pressure in India, Netflix and Amazon back down on daring films
Hindu nationalists aligned with the BJP government use mass public pressure and the threat of criminal cases to shape or entirely block films produced by Netflix and Amazon, resulting in a culture of self-censorship.
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When the U.S. streaming giants, Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, entered India seven years ago, they promised to shake up one of the world’s most important entertainment markets, a film-obsessed nation with more than 1 billion people and a homegrown moviemaking industry with fans worldwide.
Just as the BJP 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, they have used the threat of criminal cases and coordinated mass public pressure to shape what Indian content gets produced by Netflix and Prime Video.
And despite investing more than $1 million to produce “Indi (r) a’s Emergency,” a documentary about the 1975-1977 period when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and censored the media, Netflix recently relinquished the rights and will not release the film, which contains veiled commentary about the Modi administration, people familiar with the project said.
In college, he didn’t pursue science like his parents wanted, and instead hung out with the leftist street theater troupe, the Jana Natya Manch, and rode a rickety bicycle across New Delhi to watch films by Fritz Lang, Bimal Roy and Tomu Uchida.
In 2018, Hastings joked at a conference in New Delhi that he could acquire 100 million new subscribers in India alone — nearly what Netflix had worldwide at the time — and would invest heavily in local content like an upcoming crime thriller co-directed by Kashyap and his longtime collaborator Vikramaditya Motwane.
Today, along elevated highways, in chic neighborhoods and on the sides of city buses in Mumbai, advertisements for new Prime Video and Netflix shows are ubiquitous, a reminder that the companies continue to bet big on India despite mounting political constraints.
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