Tax officials in India have raided BBC news offices in the country’s two largest cities weeks after the station aired reports criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s actions during deadly religious unrest in Gujarat when he was the state’s top government official.
A spokesman for the British broadcaster said Indian authorities were still at the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai as of Tuesday night, adding that some staff had been asked to stay with them.
“We are supporting our employees during this time and we continue to hope that this situation will be resolved as soon as possible,” the spokesman said. “Our production and journalism will continue as usual and we are committed to serving our audiences in India.”
The BBC’s World Service reported that officers in New Delhi said they had a search warrant and that some employees’ phones had been stolen. Calls to some of his reporters Tuesday afternoon went unanswered.
“India’s tax authorities are conducting raids on BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai,” Jannat Jalil, a journalist and presenter for the BBC World Service, said on Twitter on Tuesday. “This comes weeks after a BBC documentary questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role during the Gujarat riots in 2002.”
A spokeswoman for India’s Income Tax Agency told the Financial Times that she could only confirm that the agency was “taking some action” at the BBC. “It’s a limited operation, a survey,” she said, denying the raids were “a search operation of the type misquoted in the media.”
The BBC last month aired a two-part documentary that raised questions about Modi’s actions during the 2002 religious riots that left more than 1,000 dead, mostly members of the Muslim minority. The report claimed Modi, who was Gujarat’s prime minister at the time before rising to national office in 2014, was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that made the violence possible.
His government dismissed the film as a “propaganda piece” and a product of a “colonial mindset,” invoking an emergency law to prevent it from being distributed online. However, many Indians used virtual private networks to watch it.
The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office is understood to be closely monitoring the situation.
The Editors Guild of India said in a statement that the use of tax collections represents a “continuation of a trend of using government agencies to intimidate and harass press organizations critical of government policies”. The action “undermines the rule of law democracy,” she added.
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India has a track record of conducting fiscal or regulatory inspections of institutions and companies that have fallen out of favour. Last year she sent tax inspectors to investigate a leading think tank, the local branch of Oxfam and a fund that supports independent news outlets.
Recently, Chinese handset makers and gaming companies have also been subject to tax audits amid rising China-India tensions.
India’s ranking on press freedom indices has declined in recent years as media and journalists criticizing the Modi government or other government officials face lawsuits and pressure from the government or advertisers not to publish controversial reports.
Reporters Without Borders ranked India 150th in the world for press freedom in 2022, compared to 142 the year before. The watchdog said that while the Indian press used to be progressive, “things changed radically” when Modi became prime minister and a “spectacular rapprochement” between the ruling Bharatiya Janata party and the big family owners who dominated the media, brought about.
Adani, the industry group at the center of a widening corporate governance controversy, recently acquired NDTV, a leading broadcaster, after a hostile takeover that raised concerns about editorial independence.