New Delhi: In an article on the recent ‘surveys’ at its India offices, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has alleged that Income Tax Department officials stopped journalists from working and even misbehaved with some of them.
While the I-T Department had claimed that the survey – which lasted three days, including overnight – was carried out in such a way that BBC employees could continue to work, an article in BBC Hindi has directly contradicted this.
“BBC journalists were not allowed to work for many hours. The Income Tax Department employees and policemen also misbehaved with several journalists,” the article reads. Journalists’ computers were searched, their phones were intercepted and information was sought from them about their working methods. Along with this, the journalists working in the Delhi office were stopped from writing anything about this survey.”
“Even when people were allowed to work after senior editors persistently asked the officials to let work continue, Hindi and English journalists were stopped from working. Journalists of both these languages were allowed to work only when they reached close to the broadcast time,” it continues.
In its first official statement on the Income Tax department ‘surveys’, the Union finance ministry claimed on Friday that the exercise had revealed that the “income/profits shown by various group entities is not commensurate with the scale of operations in India”.
The government note, released through the Press Information Bureau, does not name the BBC – but calls it “a prominent international Media Company at Delhi and Mumbai.”
BBC had recently released a documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots. The Union government had blocked the documentary on Twitter and YouTube and said it had “propagandist agenda.” The timing of the raids have thus been criticised as a purported attempt to diminish press freedom.
The Income Tax officials’ survey was done under Section 133A of the Income-Tax Act, 1961, the government said. As Deepak Joshi had written for The Wire while the survey was on, Section 133A controls the remit of the department’s power to conduct a survey. A survey by tax authorities is a comparatively less invasive and intrusive exercise, giving limited jurisdiction and powers to the officers, he wrote.