TLI Staff
New Delhi: Weeks after the federal government banned BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Gujarat riots, the Income Tax (I-T) authorities on Tuesday carried out search and survey operations on the state-owned British broadcaster’s India office.
While an official statement by I-T department is awaited on the reasons behind the action, it is largely being seen as a move to keep the British media behemoth in line.
Reacting to the news of I-T raids on BBC, Congress party General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said that his party has been demanding probe into Adani group for alleged accounting fraud and market manipulation but government was after BBC.
“Vinashkale vipreet buddhi (when one’s doom approaches, his intelligence works perversely),” Ramesh said.
Late last month, American short-seller Hindenburg had come up with a report titled “Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History” alleging that the business conglomerate had engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.
Adani group has dismissed the report and termed it as a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by India’s highest courts.
While the government has so far maintained that concerned regulators are looking into the issues raised by Hindenburg Research.
Media has largely been supine in India over the last 8-10 years of the Modi government with the world’s prestigious weekly The Economist recently observing that had it not been Hindenburg Research, Indian media firms would have unlikely dared to question the corporate governance issues at Adani group led by Gautam Adani, the Ahmedabad-based businessman believed to be close to Modi.
In the past, several India media outlets critical of the government faced the ire of federal enforcement agencies such as I-T and ED.
For instance, the I-T department had in 2021 conducted raids on offices of Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar for alleged tax evasion. In September 2021, the digital media outlets Newslaundry and NewsClick had also faced the heat from the tax department.
Founders of another media firm The Wire had also faced searches by the Delhi Police under Union Home Ministry led by Amit Shah.