© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Police officers outside a building containing BBC offices, where income tax officers are conducting a search, in New Delhi, India, February 14, 2023. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis
By Krishn Kaushik, Devjyot Ghoshal, Saurabh Sharma and Aditya Kalra
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – At around 11am on February 14, about 20 Indian tax officials and police officers stormed the BBC offices in New Delhi, yelling at staff to get away from their computers and hand over their mobile phones, according to two people. present.
At the company’s office in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, tax officials launched a second raid. The government said the BBC had not responded to repeated requests to clarify its tax matters relating to profits and remittances from its operations in India.
The BBC has said it is cooperating fully with tax authorities and hopes to resolve matters quickly, adding that its journalists will continue to report “without fear or favouritism”. He declined to comment for this story.
Three weeks before the raids, which the government described as a “poll,” the BBC released a two-part documentary that included an examination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in sectarian riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002 when he was prime minister. minister there. . The documentary, which was only broadcast in Britain, accused Modi of fostering a climate of impunity that fueled the violence.
The Modi government called the documentary “biased” and reflecting a “colonial mentality”. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar told the ANI news agency last week that it was “politics by other means” and suggested that his timing was intended to undermine support for Modi. The BBC has said it stands behind the reports.
The 72-year-old prime minister enjoys high approval ratings and is expected to run for re-election next year for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In late January, Indian authorities ordered the removal of social media posts sharing the documentary, and police detained some Indian students who tried to screen it, saying it would disturb the peace. They were released shortly after.
Tax inspections at BBC offices – during which officials cloned the mobile phones of some senior officials and searched the computers, according to the two people present – have raised the concerns of some journalists and rights watchdogs. media about what they say is a decrease in press. freedom under Modi.
Reuters spoke to eight Indian journalists, industry executives and media analysts who said some outlets that reported critically on the government have been subjected to inspections by government agencies, the suspension of state advertising and the arrest of reporters.
“There has never been a golden age of Indian journalism,” said Abhinandan Sekhri, chief executive of independent online media group Newslaundry, whose New Delhi offices were twice surveyed by tax officials in 2021 after critical coverage of the Indian government. Modi. “But it’s never been like now.”
A criminal case brought by the tax department against Sekhri alleging tax evasion and falsifying a valuation report was thrown out by a judge in Delhi in November. Sekhri has sued the government for attacks on her fundamental rights and freedom of expression; the case is being heard in the Delhi High Court.
Modi’s government has strenuously denied that the BBC’s prosecution, the first against an international news organization in decades, was a response to the film.
“The BBC operates under two private companies in India: like any other foreign company, they are open to scrutiny and tax laws apply to them,” said Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The BBC had received more than 10 tax notices before the documentary aired, he said.
Reuters could not independently confirm this. The tax agency did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Since Modi took office in 2014, India has risen from 140th in the World Press Freedom Index, an annual ranking by the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, to 150th last year, the lowest in its history. .
The Modi government rejects the Index’s findings, questions its methodology and says India has a vibrant free press.
India, the world’s most populous democracy with 1.4 billion people, has thousands of newspapers and hundreds of television news channels.
Gupta, the Information Ministry adviser, denied that any government agency has attacked the media in response to the coverage or suspended any advertising. He said the government had repeatedly stated that harassment of journalists was unacceptable and against the law.
CHOKING FUNDS
The Publishers Union of India, an industry association, said the BBC raids were part of a trend of “government agencies being used to intimidate and harass news organisations”. He cited four similar tax inspections against the media in 2021.
In one of them, tax authorities raided the offices of Dainik Bhaskar, one of India’s most widely circulated newspapers, in July 2021, alleging that it evaded taxes on income worth 7 billion Indian rupees (84.47 million). of dollars). The newspaper has contested the charge and the case is ongoing.
The newspaper, part of DB Corp, one of India’s largest newspaper groups, had published a series of articles alleging that the authorities mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and failed to report the deaths. The government has denied errors in its response and undercounting.
A senior executive at Dainik Bhaskar, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the raids followed an unexplained disruption to advertising by the federal government and six BJP-controlled states starting in February 2021. The suspension lasted until August 2022 and cost the paper more than 1 billion rupees ($12.25 million), it said.
A spokesman for the newspaper declined to comment. State governments did not respond to requests for comment. When asked about the case, Gupta, a senior adviser to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said the government did not pull the advertisements due to critical reports.
In a report last year, Reporters Without Borders said that despite large readership, many Indian news organizations were vulnerable to financial pressure because of their reliance on government advertising.
The takeover of some media groups by billionaires seen as close to Modi has also led to the silencing of independent voices in the Indian press, he said.
Between 2014 and early December 2022, the federal government spent 64.9 billion Indian rupees ($784.34 million) on advertising in print and electronic media, it said in a statement to parliament late last year. However, the figures showed that spending has declined in recent years.
Gupta said there were complaints after the government cut its advertising spending, but that was not an attack on press freedom.
“The government does not exist to finance the media. We don’t want media that is loyal to us or indebted to us for the money we give them,” he said.
‘CRITICISM AS AN ENEMY’
Reports from international press freedom watchdogs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), say that, in addition to financial pressures on media organizations, India’s federal and state governments have stopped an increasing number of journalists for their reporting.
At least seven journalists remained behind bars in India as of December, the highest number in 30 years, according to CPJ’s annual global tracker released December 14.
In some cases, reporters have been detained by state governments, which control local police forces, after reporting on minor issues.
On March 29, 2022, Ajeet Ojha, a reporter for the Hindi-language newspaper Amar Ujala in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, wrote a story about early high school exams being leaked to students in the city of Balia. Ojha wrote that an investigation was underway into who leaked the documents.
The following day, the 42-year-old reporter was arrested by police and charged with leaking the evidence documents himself, according to the police report, reviewed by Reuters.
“I spent 27 nights in jail,” Ojha said, adding that he is still charged with two counts, although some criminal charges were dropped by police. Balia police did not respond to requests for comment.
Gyanendra Shukla, a veteran reporter who led the campaign for Ojha’s release, said the BJP-controlled state government viewed “critics as an enemy.”
“They have forgotten that the job of a journalist is to highlight problems and criticize the system,” he said.
The Uttar Pradesh government did not respond to requests for comment. Gupta, the ministry adviser, said the arrest was a matter for state authorities.
