Photo : webshot. 

July 23,2021

Anna Murray 

The 63-year-old Gujarati and Marathi-language newspaper Dainik Bhaskar reported in the early morning of July 22 that tax inspectors visited its offices in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. As part of a tax investigation, Indian officials raided the Bhopal home of Sudhir Agrawal, managing director of Dainik Bhaskar. Tax officials also raided the homes of several Dainik Bhaskar employees, according to the paper.

The raid by Indian tax officials on the newspaper Dainik Bhaskar, which took on Narendra Modi over the pandemic, was interpreted as an attack on press freedom by journalists and leading opposition politicians.

Earlier this year, during the devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the newspaper Dainik Bhaskar shocked India by reporting dead bodies in the Ganges. Om Gaur, the national editor of Dainik Bhaskar, had bitterly led the paper's coverage of corpses floating in the Ganges in May, as the official death toll from COVID-19 began to exceed 4,000 per day. The paper criticized authorities for underreporting COVID-19 deaths and challenged the handling of the crisis by state officials and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

Several of its reports were cited by the international media, much to the Indian government's embarrassment, showing people left to fend for themselves in a health emergency while top ministers were busy campaigning. In retaliation, the government appears to be employing taxation as a weapon, cracking down on the paper that accurately depicted what happened in India during the second wave of COVID-19.

According to the most recent World Press Freedom Index 2021, released on April 20 by the international journalism nonprofit organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), India is ranked 142 out of 180 countries. Meanwhile, India remains one of the countries classified as "bad" for journalism, as well as one of the most dangerous for journalists attempting to do their jobs properly.