- Sunday, February 23, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Income-tax surveys at the BBC‘s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai in February, weeks after the country’s Narendra Modi government accused the British broadcaster of running propaganda after it released a two-part documentary series on Modi’s role in the riots in Gujarat in 2002, have raised questions over the state of freedom of press in the south Asian nation.
While the BBC said it was cooperating with the tax authorities and reiterated that the journalists would continue to report “without fear or favour”, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told his British counterpart James Cleverly in New Delhi last week after the latter went there for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting that entities operating in India would have to comply with the local laws.
The incidents, including the fact that even mobile phones of some senior staff members and computers were searched during the income-tax searches, have raised concerns over the freedom of the press in Modi’s India although the leader continues to enjoy a high approval rate and could be seen as a favourite to win his third straight term in the general elections next year.
Reuters spoke to executives from the media industry and analysts who said that some of the news outlets that critically reported on the government have been targeted by means of inspection through government agencies, suspension of government advertising and even arrest of reporters.
“There’s never been a golden age of Indian journalism,” Abhinandan Sekhri, chief executive of Newslaundry, an independent online media group, whose offices in New Delhi were surveyed more than once by tax officials in 2021 after a critical coverage of Modi’s administration, told Reuters.
“But it has never been like it is now.”
A judge later threw out a criminal case which was filed by the tax department against Sekhri alleging evasion of tax and forging a valuation report. He later sued the government for attacks on his fundamental rights and freedom of expression and the case is still being heard in the high court in Delhi, the Reuters report added.
The Modi government said the BBC operates in India under two private companies and like any other foreign company, they are open to scrutiny and tax laws are applicable to them. A top source in India’s information and broadcasting ministry said the BBC had received more than 10 tax notices before the documentary was broadcast, Reuters reported.
While India has slumped to the 150th place in World Press Freedom Index, an annual ranking by non-profit Reporters Without Borders, its worst ever, after Modi came to power in 2014, the government refuses to accept it by questioning its methodology.
The Editors Guild of India, an industry association, said the raids at the BBC were part of a trend of “government agencies being used to intimidate and harass news organisations”, Reuters reported.
It cited four similar tax inspections against the media two years ago.
One of those happened at the offices of Dainik Bhaskar, one of India’s largest newspapers by circulation, which were raided in July 2021 by the tax officials, who accused it of evading taxes on income worth Rs 7 billion.
The paper has also contested the charge.
Last year, Reporters Without Borders said despite high readership, a number of Indian news organisations were under economic pressure because of their reliance on government advertising.
The acquisition of some of the media groups by billionaires seen close to the prime minister has also led to the silencing of Indian press’s independent voice, it said.
Reports from international press freedom watchdogs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), are of the opinion that in addition to the financial pressures on media companies — the federal and state governments in India have also detained a growing number of journalists for their reporting, Reuters added.
At least seven journalists remained behind bars in India as of December, the highest number in 30 years, according to the CPJ’s annual global tracker released on December 14, the news outlet said.
