- Friday, March 07, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
The Delhi Police has raided the premises of a news website which is known for criticising the Narendra Modi government over a retracted article about a politician who is in charge of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) social media campaigns.
It was reported that police officers went to the homes of a number of editors of The Wire at midnight and seized their laptops and phones. The website’s office in New Delhi was also searched.
The law-keepers acted on a complaint by Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP’s social media division, who accused the website of publishing a fake story causing damage to his reputation.
According to The Wire’s report, Malviya used special privileges give to him by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to take down posts that criticised the saffron party.
“They [the stories] vitiated the atmosphere and severely dented relationships and trust built over years in order for me to carry out the functions of my responsibility,” Malviya was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
The Wire found after publication that a researcher had falsified documents that were used in the story.
It acknowledged the error and retracted the story before acknowledging the need for more stringent verification by independent experts.
The website also filed a complaint against the freelance researcher, Devesh Kumar, accusing him of providing fabricated material.
Siddharth Varadarajan, the website’s editor, said on Tuesday (1) that Kumar had confessed to fabricating the evidence.
However, the raids came under heavy criticism with journalists and opposition parties slamming the government saying it tried to muzzle the press.
They have alleged time and again that ever since Modi came to power in 2014, freedom of expression in India has been severely restricted, with much of the country’s mainstream media speaking in favour of the government.
Only a handful of news channels and publications are said to be functioning independently.
Senior Indian journalist Suhasini Haidar called the raid a “thinly veiled intimidation”.
A spokesperson for the opposition Indian National Congress tweeted: “Modi govt’s move on every free media voice: stifle, suppress, subjugate, strangle … nation has turned into a police state.”
An editorial on The Citizen, another news website, said that journalists need to exercise responsibility and accountability, but condemned the raid.
“Using the police to raid the homes of the senior editors is unacceptable and a clear infringement of the long-established norms concerning the media. This amounts to intimidation and is action used by governments to muzzle the media by spreading fear and terror,” it said.
In the latest World Press Freedom index, published by Reporters Without Borders in May, India went down to 150 from 142 in 2021 and 133 in 2016 (out of 180 countries).
