February 14, 2023, 8:53 AM
February 14, 2023, 8:53 AM
The Indian tax services raided the BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai on Tuesday, February 14, 2023, several sources from the British public chain told news agencies such as Reuters, AP and AFP.
Police cordoned off the building and half a dozen officers were stationed outside the New Delhi office, which occupies two floors, to prevent people from entering or leaving, a BBC employee based in that capital office described to AFP: ” There is a tax intervention in the offices, they are confiscating all the phones,” the official said, refusing to reveal his department.
The record comes just weeks after the broadcast of a documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s actions during deadly sectarian riots in 2002. Neither the Indian tax department nor the BBC immediately responded to emails from news agencies. , looking for comments.
“The Income Tax Authorities are currently at the BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai and we are fully cooperating,” the British chain confirmed, however, on Twitter: “We hope this situation is resolved as soon as possible.” possible”.
The riots and the BCC documentary
Last month, the station aired a two-part documentary alleging that Modi ordered police to turn a blind eye to sectarian riots in the state of Gujarat, where he was prime minister at the time. That wave of violence caused at least 1,000 deaths, most of them members of the country’s Muslim minority.
Shortly after its publication, the Indian government blocked videos and tweets linking to the documentary, using emergency powers under its information technology laws, calling it “hostile propaganda and anti-Indian garbage.”
Subsequently, groups of university students organized screenings of the documentary, despite campus bans, defying government efforts to stop its broadcast. Police have arrested two dozen students at the prestigious Delhi University after stopping a screening there.
The 2002 Gujarat riots began after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a train fire. Thirty-one Muslims were convicted of criminal conspiracy and murder for that incident.
British Foreign Report vs. indian supreme court inquiry
The BBC documentary cited a previously classified British Foreign Office report citing unnamed sources as saying Modi met senior police officers and “ordered them not to intervene” in violence against Muslims by right-wing Hindu groups.
The violence was “politically motivated” and the aim “was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas,” the British Foreign Office report said. The “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and was impossible “without the climate of impunity created by the state government… Narendra Modi is directly responsible,” he concluded.
Modi, who led Gujarat from 2001 until his election as prime minister in 2014, was briefly subjected to a US travel ban because of that violence. However, a special investigative team appointed by the Supreme Court of India to investigate the role of Modi and others in the violence said in 2012 that it found no evidence to prosecute the then prime minister.
