Tax officials raid BBC India office after PM Modi’s documentary. The BBC’s New Delhi headquarters were raided by Indian tax authorities on Tuesday, weeks after the broadcast of a documentary exposing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in deadly sectarian rioting in 2002.
To stop anybody from entering or leaving the office, which is located on two storeys, police cordoned off the facility and stationed six cops outside.
AFP was informed by a BBC staffer working there that the tax raid was ongoing and that authorities were “confiscating all phones.”
“There is government procedure happening inside the office,” an official said, declining to disclose their department. India’s Income Tax Department could not be reached for comment by AFP.
After the raids, BJP spokesman Gaurav Bhatia told reporters that “the BBC indulges in anti-India propaganda”. “India is a country which gives an opportunity to every organisation… as long as you don’t spew venom. “
In a two-part documentary that was shown last month, the broadcaster claimed that Modi, who was the state’s premier at the time, had instructed police to avoid sectarian violence in Gujarat.
At least 1,000 individuals were killed in the unrest, most of them minority Muslims. Using emergency powers allowed by its information technology laws, the Indian government restricted videos and tweets that contained links to the documentary.
Tax officials raid BBC India office after PM Modi’s documentary as the documentary was denounced by government advisor Kanchan Gupta as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.”
Later, in spite of school restrictions and attempts by the government to suppress its distribution, university student groups organised screenings of the documentary. Police interrupted a screening at the prestigious Delhi University and detained twenty-two students there. After 59 Hindu pilgrims died in a train fire in 2002, there were riots in Gujarat. In connection with that incident, 31 Muslims were convicted of murder and criminal conspiracy.
The BBC documentary cited a previously classified British foreign ministry report quoting unnamed sources saying that Modi met senior police officers and “ordered them not to intervene” in the anti-Muslim violence by right-wing Hindu groups that followed.
The violence was “politically motivated” and the aim “was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas”, the foreign ministry 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”, it concluded.
From 2001 until his election as prime minister in 2014, Modi served as governor of Gujarat. Because of the unrest, the United States briefly imposed a travel ban on him.
In 2012, a special investigative committee established by the Indian Supreme Court to look into the roles Modi and others played in the violence reported that they had not discovered any evidence to bring charges against the then-chief minister.
