According to campaigners, the government’s police raids on the homes of well-known journalists in India on Tuesday are an effort to” muzzle” free speech.
As part of an investigation into its revenue, the creator of the information website NewsClick was detained in accordance with an anti-terrorist rules.
The action, according to human rights activists, was a” brutal assault” against separate reporters.
Authorities are merely carrying out their duties, according to ministers.
Authorities later confirmed that they had detained Amit Chakravarty, the mind of human resources at NewsClick, as well as the company’s leader Prabir Purkayastha.
Leaders are reportedly looking into claims that NewsClick, an independent media and current affairs site that criticizes the authorities, received money illegally from China.
At a click pub in New Delhi on Wednesday, journalists and writers participated in protest.
Yogendra Yadav, a human rights activist, who was present, told the BBC that it was” an attempt to muzzle voices ,” adding,” There can be no doubt that is an out-and-out attack on the Indian media.”
Arundhati Roy, a novelist who won the Booker Prize on Wednesday, claimed that terrorists now include intellectuals, writers, and journalists in the Unlawful Activities( Prevention ) Act.
According to this anti-terrorism work,” they have confiscated the phones and the servers, they have charged them, collapsing the difference between terrorists and editors.”
What they are doing here is very, very brazenly ratcheting up their power before the upcoming votes.
Journalists Abhisar Sharma, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Aunindyo Chakravarty, Urmilesh, Bhasha Singh, well-known comedian Sanjay Rajoura and writer Sohail Hashmi were likewise questioned. Some were brought to the police department.
According to news organization ANI, searches were also conducted at the blog’s Delhi company.
The raids are reportedly related to a situation that NewsClick was accused of receiving money from an American millionaire to distribute” Chinese propaganda” in an August report in the New York Times.
The assaults, according to historian Ramachandra Guha, were” terrible, cruel, and draconian.”
Guha claimed that while he said it was too early to speculate as to the motivation behind the action, some of NewsClick’s editors were Hindi in a Hindi multimedia environment that is” subservient” to Mr. Modi.
He continued by saying that the site had been highlighting” friend socialism.”
A number of press stores have been looked into for alleged financial wrongdoing since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party took office in 2014, raising concerns about media freedom in the largest politics in history.
Tax authorities questioned employees about the BBC’s business operations in India earlier this year during a search of its headquarters. The searches in Delhi and Mumbai had taken place weeks after the journalist had aired a video in the UK that criticized Mr. Modi’s contribution to the Gujarat riots of 2002.
Following its vital coverage of how the government handled the Covid – 19 pandemic, tax officials also charged the Dainik Bhaskar paper with tax avoidance in 2021.
News is not a crime, according to Amnesty International. The latest attempt by the American government to destroy separate and important advertising include the NewsClick assaults and the arrests of Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty.
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29 August 2018
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