NewsClick Editor Detained in India: Is the Government Cracking Down on Independent Media?
The founder of NewsClick website, Prabir Purkayastha, and another staff member were arrested after raids because they were accused of getting money from outside the country to spread pro-China lies.
India’s police have caught a well-known writer and founder of a news website for allegedly getting money from abroad to spread pro-China propaganda. This was done under a strict anti-terrorism law.
Local media said that Prabir Purkayastha, the founder and editor-in-chief of NewsClick, was arrested on Tuesday evening. He was charged with breaking the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and criminal plot.
The website’s head of human resources, Amit Chakravarty, was also arrested in the same case, according to news accounts.
As part of an investigation into possible illegal foreign funding of the media company, the office of the English-language news site in New Delhi and the homes of a number of its journalists and writers were searched. This is what led to the arrests.
As part of the search, laptops and cell phones were taken away.
“A special investigations team started a search operation to find all the people who might be getting money from overseas to run a media group whose main goal was to spread foreign propaganda,” said an official from the home ministry who was in charge of the raids by the federally-controlled Delhi Police.
No one from NewsClick was available right away to say anything. On its website, the company says that it focuses on “progressive movements” when reporting on news from India and other places.
Crack Down on Press Freedom
On August 17, Indian authorities filed a case against NewsClick and its reporters. This was done after a story in the New York Times said that the website had received money from US millionaire Neville Roy Singham, who, according to the Times, “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.”
The report said that Singham was close to Beijing and “financed its propaganda around the world.”
Singham and NewsClick both said they were not true. At the time, Purkayastha said that the claims were not new and that the website would answer them in court.
Since 2020, when their armies fought in a disputed border area and at least 20 Indian soldiers and 4 Chinese troops died, relations between India and China have been tense.
Since then, New Delhi has banned many Chinese apps, like TikTok, and started tax investigations into some Chinese mobile phone companies.
More than a dozen journalists and other writers with ties to NewsClick had their homes searched on Tuesday.
A home ministry source said that the raids were part of an investigation by India’s financial crime control agency, the Enforcement Directorate, into possible money laundering by NewsClick. The Delhi Police also shut down the office of NewsClick.
The police said in a statement that 37 male suspects were questioned at the NewsClick office and 9 female suspects were questioned at their homes.
The cops said that 30 places linked to the portal and its writers were searched. The writers Urmilesh, Aunindyo Chakravarty, Abhisar Sharma, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, and Sohail Hashmi, as well as the historian Sohail Hashmi, were all questioned.
Hashmi told the AFP news agency that the raid at his home was linked to an investigation into NewsClick based on the warrant they were unwilling to show him.
Hashmi said he had to give up his laptop, phone, and hard drives with more than a decade’s worth of his work. He called the raid a “combination of intimidation and a crackdown on freedom of press and speech.”
The Press Club of India said that the arrests were very scary. On Wednesday, a group of writers will hold a protest march in New Delhi.
Draconian Terror law Regime
The nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said the raids were okay because investigating agencies need to find out who is giving money to media groups from abroad.
Anurag Thakur, India’s minister for information and media, told reporters, “I don’t need to explain.” “If they think someone has done something wrong, search agencies are free to look into it.”
In a statement, the INDIA Alliance, a group of 28 political parties that are against the government, said that over the past nine years, the government has used different investigating agencies to target and silence the media.
Shoaib Daniyal, the political editor at the news website Scroll, told Al Jazeera, “Even if you believed the worst of these allegations, you could have gone after the website’s management.” However, what is happening now is that even junior employees and contributors are being raided.
“India’s terror laws are very harsh, and people can be arrested and locked up for years without being tried,” he said.
India has dropped from 150th to 161st on the World Press Freedom Index, which is done every year by the non-profit Reporters Without Borders. This is India’s lowest place ever. The government of Modi doesn’t agree with the group’s ranks. It questions the group’s methods and says that India has a strong and free press.
A few months ago, Indian tax officials went to the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. This happened right after the BBC aired a program that was critical of Modi.
Journalists who aren’t happy with the government say they are being harassed more, even on social media, where Modi’s party has a strong influence.
Critics say that Modi’s government has tried to put pressure on rights groups by closely looking at their funds and making it harder for them to get money from abroad.
The Network of Women in Media in India said that “prominent voices of dissent” were the targets of Tuesday’s “shocking” search.
Abhisar Sharma, a writer, said on Tuesday night that he was back home after a “day-long interrogation” by the police.
He wrote on social media, “I will keep asking people in power questions, especially those who are afraid of simple questions.”
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