Netflix in its newly premiered show Street Food has taken the Pakistani line and shown Kashmir as a part of Pakistan.
The documentary that recently premiered on Netflix, focuses on street food across Asia including India. India’s street food is talked about in episode 3. However, Netflix displays the wrong map of India showing Kashmir as part of Pakistan.
India’s map shown by Netflix has cut off part of the Indian state Kashmir which is illegally occupied by Pakistan.
To explain things better, following is the real map of Kashmir. In the map, one can clearly see the “Northern Areas – Illegally incorporated with Pakistan”. That is the part of Kashmir which Netflix has cut off from India.
Netflix now has business interest in India and they could have customised it. While technology poses challenges, it also poses solutions. For example, they could have used a dotted border and made the area illegally occupied by Pakistan as grey or uploaded a different variant of the map which is accessible when logged in from India.
In its episode called Bandersnatch of the hugely popular series Black Mirror, Netflix had shown how personalised and customised user experience is not entirely impossible.
The implementation of the rules requiring the publishers to show the official map has been lax. Last year, during the elections held in Pakistan, Indian Express had wrongly shown parts of Kashmir as part of Pakistan. Even The Quint had recently shown Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir as Pakistan territory. And despite being pointed out, Quint has continued to show the PoK as part of Pakistan’s territory.
Since even Indian publications appear non-serious about using the correct map of India, perhaps it’s understandable that players like Netflix won’t care when even The Quint gets away with it.
