Dalit Camera’s YouTube channel ‘Dalit Camera: Through Un-Touchable Eyes’ has been terminated with no official communication from YouTube and nobody knows why.
“This account has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted,” says a declaration by YouTube on what used to be Dalit Camera’s page — South Live reports that this comes months after the Hyderabad police profiled the channel and allegedly resorted to a secret enquiry about the people behind it.
Dalit Camera has been covering issues that have been neglected, including the Una protests, land rights struggles in Thrissur, Kerala, and the recent Chennai police brutality. Reportedly, their video of Rohith Vemula talking about his caste has come under the scanner—“I take a video and upload it on YouTube, now you claim that it is your video. When one person is protesting, in the background there is music. How its becomes a copyright issue?” Ravichandran Bathran, the founder of Dalit Camera said to South Live.
At a time when organisations like Navsarjan, one of the largest Dalit organisations in Gujarat, among others, have not had their FCRA license renewed by the government (and are being called ‘anti-national’), how has Dalit Camera‘s channel simply been ‘terminated’ in this manner without notice or explanation?