[As covid-19 roiled India this spring, Dainik Bhaskar splashed photos of funeral pyres on its front pages, reported on corpses floating in the Ganges River and repeatedly challenged the government’s narrative about the disaster and its official death statistics. Gaur, the editor, contributed an op-ed in the New York Times that made waves in his home country.]
By Gerry Shih and Niha Masih
The Dainik Bhaskar Group, whose
Hindi-language broadsheet boasts a combined circulation of more than 4 million,
was raided simultaneously in at least four locations, including at its
headquarters in Madhya Pradesh state.
Surabhi Ahluwalia, a spokeswoman
for the tax authority, said searches were underway at multiple locations across
the country linked to the group, but she declined to share details about the
case. She said the department usually conducts searches in matters of tax
evasion.
But the justification of tax
evasion was panned by government critics, who pointed out that Dainik Bhaskar
has been persistently needling India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with
its coverage, including as recently as this week.
[India
used spyware to hack journalists and others]
The Press Club of India said in a
statement that it “deplores such acts of intimidation by the government through
enforcement agencies to deter the independent media.”
Under the administration of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, who rose to power in 2014, several critical media
outlets have found themselves in tax investigators’ crosshairs, raising fears
about the health of the independent press in the world’s largest democracy.
Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists, recently placed India
at 142nd place in its press freedom rankings, roughly on par with Myanmar and
Mexico.
Om Gaur, Dainik Bhaskar’s national
editor, said his staff’s mobile devices were seized during the raids as a
“tactic to harass journalists.”
“The raid is the outcome of our
aggressive reporting, especially during the second wave of the pandemic in
April,” Gaur said by telephone. “Unlike some other media, we reported how
people were dying for lack of oxygen and hospital beds.”
The tax investigation “is not going
to change anything for us,” he added. “We will keep doing good journalism.”
As covid-19 roiled India this
spring, Dainik Bhaskar splashed photos of funeral pyres on its front pages,
reported on corpses floating in the Ganges River and repeatedly challenged the
government’s narrative about the disaster and its official death statistics.
Gaur, the editor, contributed an op-ed in the New York Times that made waves in
his home country.
The paper has sometimes taken a
less-than-orthodox approach to holding government accountable: As citizens in
the state of Gujarat struggled to procure covid-19 medication in April, the
paper published the phone number of the BJP’s state president in a massive
front-page headline.
This week, after The Washington
Post and its media partners disclosed the use of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware against
Indian journalists, Dainik Bhaskar was one of the few Hindi-language papers
that featured a story about the investigation’s findings prominently. (Dainik
Bhaskar was not a partner in the Pegasus Project.)
India has neither confirmed nor
denied that it obtained Pegasus spyware, which is licensed only to governments,
and did not respond to questions about whether it is an NSO Group client.
Dainik Bhaskar also followed up
with an article recapping what it said was Modi’s record of snooping on
political rivals going back 15 years, when he served as chief minister in
Gujarat. The article was quickly retracted.
On Thursday, opposition figures
rebuked the government.
“Income Tax raid on Dainik Bhaskar
newspaper & Bharat Samachar news channel is a brazen attempt to suppress
the voice of media,” Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of Rajasthan state and a
member of the Congress Party, said in a tweet. “Modi government cannot tolerate even an iota of
its criticism.”
India’s freewheeling press was
stunned in 2017 when the government launched an investigation into New Delhi Television,
which was known for its independent streak.
The top investigative agency raided
NDTV’s offices and the homes of its founders, the Roy family, over suspected
financial malfeasance. The channel called it a “blatant political attack on the
freedom of the press.” The company has also faced probes from various agencies
over alleged tax violations and money laundering.
In 2019, NDTV protested again when
the Roys were barred from boarding an international flight out of Mumbai.
The most
recent raids on a media outlet came in February, when authorities
investigated NewsClick, a left-leaning digital outlet, over its foreign
remittances from a businessman with alleged
links to China’s Communist Party. The outlet denied the accusations.
Shams Irfan in Srinagar contributed
to this report.
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