BBC offices in India searched by tax authorities after Narendra Modi documentary

Tax officials in India have searched BBC news bureaus in the country’s two largest cities, weeks after the broadcaster aired reports critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s actions during deadly religious riots in Gujarat when he was the state’s top ruling official.

A spokesperson for the British broadcaster said that the Indian authorities were still in the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai on Tuesday night, adding that some staff had been asked to remain with them.

“We are supporting our staff during this time and continue to hope to have this situation resolved as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said. “Our output and journalism continues as normal and we are committed to serving our audiences in India.”

The BBC’s World Service reported that officials in New Delhi said they had a warrant for the search, and that some employees’ phones had been taken. Calls to some of its reporters on Tuesday afternoon went unanswered.

“The Indian tax authorities are conducting searches at BBC offices in Delhi & Mumbai,” Jannat Jalil, a BBC World Service journalist and presenter, said on Twitter earlier on Tuesday. “This comes weeks after a BBC documentary questioned the role of PM Narendra Modi during the Gujarat riots in 2002.”

A spokesperson for India’s income tax department told the Financial Times that she could only confirm that the agency was “doing some action” at the BBC. “It is a limited action, a survey,” she said, and denied the raids were “a search operation, as wrongly quoted in the media”.

The BBC last month aired a two-part documentary that raised questions about Modi’s actions during the 2002 religious riots in which more than 1,000 people died, mostly from the minority Muslim population. The report claimed that Modi, who served as Gujarat’s chief minister at the time before rising to national office in 2014, was “directly responsible” for the “climate of impunity” that enabled the violence.

His government rejected the film as a “propaganda piece” and the product of a “colonial mindset”, and invoked an emergency law to block it from being circulated online. However, many Indians used virtual private networks to watch it.

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office is understood to be closely monitoring the situation.

The Editors Guild of India said in a statement that the use of tax surveys marked a “continuation of a trend of using government agencies to intimidate and harass press organisations that are critical of government policies”. The action “undermines constitutional democracy”, it added.

India has a record of conducting tax or regulatory inspections of institutions and companies that are out of official favour. Last year, it sent tax inspectors to investigate a leading think-tank, the local arm of Oxfam and a fund that supports independent news outlets.

Chinese mobile phonemakers and gaming companies have also been subjected to tax inspections recently against the backdrop of worsening Sino-Indian tensions.

India’s ranking on press freedom indices has been sliding in recent years, as media outlets and journalists that criticise the Modi government or other ruling officials face lawsuits and pressure from the government or advertisers not to publish controversial reports.

Reporters Without Borders ranked India 150th worldwide for press freedoms in 2022, down from 142 the year before. The watchdog said that while the Indian press was formerly progressive, “things changed radically” when Modi became prime minister and engineered a “spectacular rapprochement” between the ruling Bharatiya Janata party and the large family owners dominating the media.

Adani, the industrial group at the heart of a widening controversy over corporate governance, recently acquired NDTV, a leading broadcaster, after a hostile takeover that fuelled concerns about editorial independence.