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Pak PM Shehbaz Sharif's YouTube channel blocked in India over security
Press Trust of India New Delhi
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's YouTube channel was blocked in India on Friday amid ongoing tension between the two countries following the deadly terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam.
"The content is currently unavailable in this country because of an order from the government related to national security or public order. For more details about government removal requests, please visit the Google Transparency Report," read a message on the blocked channel.
The government had earlier this week blocked 16 Pakistani YouTube channels for allegedly disseminating "false, provocative and communally sensitive content" about India and has also strongly objected to the BBC's reportage on the Pahalgam attack.
The government's move follows recommendations from the Ministry of Home Affairs in the wake of the April 22 terror attack in the upper reaches of the Kashmir resort town in which 26 people, mostly tourists, were killed.
Besides, the Ministry of External Affairs will be monitoring the reporting of the BBC, which termed terrorists as militants, officials had said.
The YouTube channels blocked are Dawn News, Irshad Bhatti, SAMAA TV, ARY NEWS, BOL NEWS, Raftar, The Pakistan Reference, Geo News, Samaa Sports, GNN, Uzair Cricket, Umar Cheema Exclusive, Asma Shirazi, Muneeb Farooq, SUNO News and Razi Naama.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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His desire to serve his country, his wife's ill health, and financial setbacks led him to accept the job. As the new Talks Assistant, Orwell wrote a letter to Anand to convince him to write and broadcast for the BBC. Anand readily agreed. Together, tasked with encouraging anti-imperialist sentiments in India, they worked on several radio talk series. In New Weapons of War, Anand explained the meanings of war-related phrases such as 'Pluto-Democracy,' 'Propaganda,' and 'New Order,' terms commonly spoken yet poorly understood. According to Abha Sharma Rodrigues' doctoral thesis, George Orwell, The BBC, and India: A Critical Study, despite several ideological differences, the early life experiences of Anand and Orwell bore striking similarities. Not only did the zeal of reform motivate them to write, but they also went to great lengths to experience the pain of the lowest orders of society. While Anand spent time at Sabarmati Ashram, living with the untouchables and performing the tasks of a sweeper, Orwell resigned from the Indian Imperial Police and chose to live in slums, working menial jobs like a dishwasher in restaurants. As Anand uncovered casteism in Untouchable, Orwell exposed classism in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), laying bare the grim realities of poverty and exclusion in Europe's capitals. Often criticised as hypocritical and ironic, it remains debatable whether the BBC's wartime efforts to encourage anti-imperialist sentiments in India were successful. However, Orwell and Anand's experiments with language resulted in innovative broadcasts like New Weapons of War. Due to rising differences with the organisation, Orwell left the BBC in 1943, while Anand overlapped his tenure and continued to freelance as a scriptwriter and broadcaster until the end of the war. With India inching closer to freedom, he returned home and founded MARG (Modern Architectural Research Group) magazine in 1946. Drawing together the threads of his remarkable life, Anand emerges not just as a writer but as a fearless combatant whose participation in the global politics of resistance will always be remembered. From the prison cell in Amritsar to the trenches of war-torn Madrid, and from debates in Bloomsbury to broadcasting radio talks at the BBC, Anand's journey was not limited to writing. It was about proactively utilising every platform to challenge power and expose violence against the lowest orders of society, be it outcasts in India or coal miners in London. As we enter the age of renewed censorship and systemic oppression, the legacy of Anand reminds us that literature is not merely a mirror; it can be a weapon. You just have to wield it with some empathy forged in conviction and finally aim squarely at the architecture of injustice.
