Weaponizing Taxes

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Indian tax officials raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai this week, soon after the British broadcaster aired a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, NPR reported.

Dozens of tax officials entered the broadcaster’s newsrooms, seizing laptops, financial documents and phones of employees as part of an income tax “survey.”

The searches came a few weeks after the BBC aired “India: The Modi Question,” a two-part documentary that examined the prime minister’s role in the 2002 communal riots in the western state of Gujarat, which resulted in the deaths of at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslim.

The documentary raised issues about Modi’s actions – he was the state’s chief minister at the time – and claimed he was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that enabled the violence, according to the Voice of America.

The Indian government condemned the documentary as “propaganda” and banned it from being shown in India. Officials ordered social media platforms to remove links to it, using the country’s emergency powers.

Although tax officials said the survey was not vindictive, journalists and human rights groups quickly criticized the government’s move as a “clear-cut case of vendetta.”

They noted that Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has previously used tax fraud cases against other media and human rights organizations that have criticized it in the past.

Amnesty International had to suspend operations in India in 2020 when authorities froze its bank accounts due to alleged financial irregularities.

Last year, India ranked 150th out of 180 nations in Reporters Without Borders’ annual Press Freedom Index, its lowest ranking ever.