New Delhi, February 16, 2023 (PPI-OT):The ‘survey’ by Indian Income Tax officials at the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai continued late night on Wednesday, February 15. Authorities said they were investigating the British broadcaster for tax evasion, diversion of profits and non-compliance with Indian law. There was no reaction to the ‘survey’ – which comes weeks after the BBC aired a two-part documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi – from the UK government. According to The Guardian, the BBC has “previously been reluctant to seek formal political support when it comes to such incidents in an attempt to make clear it is separate from the British state”.
Tax authorities conduct a survey under Section 133A of the I-T Act, which is usually a precursor to a search and seizure operation. In a brief statement on Tuesday, BBC said that it was cooperating with the tax officials and hoped that the matter would be resolved quickly. In the international press and media bodies, the ‘surveys’ drew condemnation. The non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists said that the action “smacks of intimidation”. Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, said, “Indian authorities have used tax investigations as a pretext to target critical news outlets before, and must cease harassing BBC employees immediately, in line with the values of freedom that should be espoused in the world’s largest democracy.”
In an op-ed for Bloomberg, Bobby Ghosh, the former editor of Hindustan Times, wrote about the “attack” on press freedom since the start of the Modi era in 2014. He wrote: “I got some glimpses of how this works in an ill-starred stint as editor of Hindustan Times, New Delhi’s leading English-language newspaper. Just two years in power, the Modi government was already demonstrating an intolerance of criticism that was familiar to me from my previous experiences as a foreign correspondent in the dictatorships of the Middle East. Stories deemed embarrassing to the government or the ruling party led routinely to minatory phone calls from ministers and bureaucrats: The threats ranged from the withholding of ads and the pursuit of punitive lawsuits to investigations into my personal finances and those of my family. And yes, there were dire warnings about income-tax raids.”
Ghosh, who resigned as editor of HT abruptly in September 2017, said that “things have only gotten worse” after his departure from Delhi. “Cowed into compliance with official diktat, much of India’s media merely cheers on Modi’s abuses of power,” he said. Ghosh drew parallels between India under Modi and Turkey under President Recap Tayyip Erdogan, saying the governments have used the “same combination of economic pressure and intimidation to achieve near-total domination of the media landscape”. The governments also use “tax raids and frivolous lawsuits for harassment”, he added.
He said that the indulgence of the West has “inculcated a sense of impunity” in the leaders of the two countries. In a report, the New York Times noted that under Modi, Indian authorities “have often used such raids against independent media organisations, human rights groups and think tanks in what activists call an effort to harass critical voices into silence by targeting their funding sources”. The newspaper said that rights groups have “repeatedly expressed concern about the dwindling freedom of the press, with journalists and activists thrown in jail for long periods or mired in court cases that drag on in India’s labyrinthine judiciary”.
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