Indian tax authorities raided the office of Britain’s BBC public television station in New Delhi on Tuesday, weeks after the broadcast of a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“There is a raid by the tax authorities on the office, all the phones have been seized,” one of the BBC journalists in the New Delhi branch told France Presse, asking not to be named.
At the same time, elements linked to security and the tax department remained outside the delegation, preventing entry and exit from the building.
“The (Indian) government authorities are carrying out procedures at the station,” another BBC official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
British public television broadcast a documentary in January, divided into two episodes, indicating that Modi, Gujarat’s then prime minister, ordered police to “shut their eyes” during religious clashes in 2002.
At the time, the wave of violence left at least a thousand dead, most of them members of the Muslim community, a minority in India.
The Indian government ordered the blocking of the images from the documentary, as well as the messages broadcast by the social network Twitter about the same BBC program.
The New Delhi executive found the documentary “hostile propaganda and rubbish against India”.
Although the documentary was banned from being shown at the University of New Delhi, students organized screenings on the university campus in defiance of police orders.
Source: TSF
