In a significant judgement that has implications for freedom of the press, the Delhi High Court has vindicated Prabir Purkayastha and Newsclick. 

In a damning judgement, the High Court called the Delhi Police and Enforcement Directorate cases against Newsclick ‘mala fide’, an ‘arbitrary attack’ without ‘a whisper of any incriminating allegation’, which amounts to ‘a gross abuse of the process of law’.

The obvious question is: at whose behest are central agencies grossly abusing the process of law? The answer is clear, too: the Narendra Modi government, and in particular, the Home Ministry under Amit Shah, which directly controls Delhi Police. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is controlled by the Finance Ministry under Nirmala Sitharaman, but, crucially, the ED could not have moved without the FIR registered by the Economic Offenses Wing (EOW) of the Delhi Police in the first place. 

Newsclick and its founder Prabir Purkayastha are still facing charges under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which is a case under the Special Cell of the Delhi Police.

So, the finger points in one direction alone: Home Minister Amit Shah, and his boss, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The ‘mala fide’ intentions are theirs.

One of the world’s best-known newspapers played its own part in this sordid saga. The New York Times, which prides itself as the ‘newspaper of record’ and pats itself on the back for its ‘liberal’ values, ran a poorly-researched piece full of innuendos and guilt-by-association but no actual proof in August 2023. This ‘investigation’ was targeted at US businessman Neville Roy Singham who, it was alleged, was acting as a proxy for the Chinese government and funding organisations in many countries, including Newsclick in India. These allegations of acting at the behest of China have been denied by Singham. The NYT referenced the raid conducted by the ED in February 2021 on Newsclick offices and the residences of its founder and others. The NYT article was quoted as ‘proof’ on the floor of Parliament by BJP member Nishikant Dubey in August 2023, and the allegations against Newsclick were repeated in a press conference by Minister of Information and Broadcasting and BJP MP Anurag Thakur.

The perverse circularity of the argument cannot be missed. The ED raid of 2021 becomes the basis for NYT’s allegations, the NYT’s allegations become ‘proof’ for Dubey and Thakur, which then becomes ground for further action by ED and Delhi Police. While the High Court judgement exposing the hollow and vindictive nature of the central agencies’ claims is to be welcomed, it leaves an important question unanswered. Over a hundred journalists and other media professionals lost their jobs, had their devices and years of professional work seized, suffered harassment, incurred unnecessary expenses, had their reputations besmirched, for simply doing their job, that of honestly reporting what was happening on the ground. Prabir Purkayastha and a former colleague of his had to suffer incarceration for over seven months. It should be noted that Purkayastha was nearly 75 years old when he was imprisoned, and his former colleague (who subsequently turned approver in the case) suffers from physical handicaps. (Prabir Purkayastha is also the only person this writer knows of who has been imprisoned by two authoritarian regimes fifty years apart – he spent almost the entirety of the Emergency in jail.)

Will the Delhi Police or ED compensate Prabir Purkayastha and others for their loss of livelihood and reputation? Will Nishikant Dubey or Anurag Thakur apologise to the people whose careers they tried so hard to wreck?

This unsavoury saga has been going on for over five years. In this period, several other news organisations also faced the heat of the Modi government. Here are some prominent examples.

In July 2021, the Hindi newspaper group Dainik Bhaskar and the UP-based TV channel Bharat Samachar were raided by income tax authorities on the same day. Dainik Bhaskar claimed the raid was in retaliation of the ground reporting the paper had done of the devastation of second wave of Covid-19 and the government’s inept and callous response to it. Bharat Samachar was also targeted for the same reason. 

The English-language outlet Newslaundry was raided in September the same year. In February 2023, the offices of BBC in New Delhi and Mumbai had to play unwilling host to income tax officials, who claimed they were only conducting a ‘survey’, not a raid. This was clearly as punishment for airing a documentary critical of Modi’s role during the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002.

NDTV faced charges under multiple cases for over a decade. The CBI raided NDTV co-founders Radhika and Prannoy Roy in 2017, after which the ED also opened an investigation against them. Alongside, they also faced income tax and SEBI cases. The harassment of NDTV and its founders was multi-pronged, much like Newsclick’s, though the accusations against the two were different. After NDTV was bought by Adani, though, these cases have been closed or quashed.

For NDTV, the CBI case was the basis on which all the other cases were built. Once the CBI admitted in 2024 that it had found no evidence of criminal conspiracy, collusion or the abuse of position by bank officials or the Roys and filed a closure report, the other cases had no teeth. One can only hope that the same will happen in the case of Newsclick and the UAPA and other charges that it is still facing.

More than perhaps any other news organisation, Newsclick reported people’s struggles and movements from the ground consistently and thoroughly. This is the principal reason why this small, almost cottage-industry type news organisation was perceived as such a threat by the Modi regime. 

This writer recalls well how, at the time of the heroic farmers’ sit-in on Delhi’s borders through the pandemic, while bigger media organisations and journalists faced people’s barbs and displeasure at the protest sites, Newsclick reporters were welcomed with affection and respect. Many farmers and their leaders who refused to even speak to the mainstream ‘Godi’ media, were happy to speak to Newsclick. This was because Newsclick was not driving the agenda of the corporates and the Modi regime, it was reflecting accurately the issues faced by India’s farmers. Similarly, it was Newsclick reporters who accompanied the historic Kisan Long March from Nashik to Mumbai right for the start to its very end. Other media organisations started reporting on the March only when it had already become news. Newsclick also reported on numerous small and big struggles of working people from across India.

Amazingly, Newsclick did all this with paltry resources. Consider the amounts put out by the prosecuting agencies. The EOW accused Newsclick of receiving Rs 9.59 crore during 2018-19, to which the ED added Rs 28.46 crore as export-of-services receipts over three years. Even this inflated figure, then, only comes to just over Rs 12 crore a year. This is not even small change for a mainstream media organisation. NDTV’s annual revenue, for example, is over Rs 500 crore, while that of Network18’s is over Rs 2,000 crore.

In other words, the Rs 9.59 crore FDI that was the basis of the EOW/ED case against Newsclick is less than 2% of the Adani-owned NDTV’s annual revenue and less than 0.5% of the Ambani-controlled Network18’s annual revenue.

What this also tells us is that even in today’s corporate-controlled, pro-BJP/RSS media world, it is possible to project people’s issues and struggles with few resources, if done with imagination, journalistic rigour and a commitment to the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Astonishingly, Newsclick is the brainchild of someone who had no previous journalistic or media training or experience. Prabir Purkayastha is an engineer by training and profession, and a science activist and intellectual.

The Modi-Shah regime’s machinations stand exposed in this saga. One can only hope that someone in their legal team will now have the sense – and more importantly, the courage – to advise them to drop all charges against Newsclick and Prabir Purkayastha. At the very least, it is hoped that the High Court’s quashing of the case will lead to the removal of impediments, financial and otherwise, that have hampered Newsclick for nearly three years now. If that happens, people’s issues and struggles will once again have a strong voice that speaks with honesty, integrity, and humanity.