Bangalore: The Independent digital platform, The News Minute (TNM) has turned 8 and on the occasion, TNM, Editor-in-Chief Dhanya Rajendran has written a letter titled, ‘When the IT dept knocked on our door’ to the subscribers recounting the ordeal as the owner of small digital outlet and how isn’t easy to run a media organization in India, especially in the current political climate.
Dhanya’s letter on frequent Income Tax raids on media organizations alarm us of the shrinking space for independent media houses in the country and also exposes the government’s media intimidation.
Her letter starts by narrating an incident that happened on October 11, 2018, where 2-3 IT officials paid a visit to the TNM Bangalore office when her colleague Soumya Chatterjee was the only one in the office that morning and said they were there for a search purposes.
“A reporter with theBengaluru bureau, he had no clue about the accounts of the company. He asked them to allow him to call Vignesh, the CEO, or the whole search will be a fruitless exercise. He was allowed to do so as we rushed to the office. The search went on for a few hours. After a point, the bored guards started playing darts on our dartboard. Our phones were given back after an hour or so, and things went on as usual,” wrote Dhanya.
A simultaneous raid was happening in the office of The Quint, owned by Raghav Bahl and Ritu Kapur. Their company ‘Quintillion’ is a major investor in TNM. The raid included copying the emails of several employees.
She added, “they say the process is the punishment, and that is true. Though the searches on October 11, 2018, were hassle-free, it was a tiring and draining process for the next three years. We continued to receive I-T notices, but in the last six to eight months of this period, the frequency of these notices increased. Towards the end, we were receiving I-T notices every two weeks. The I-T Department wanted an explanation for every single bill and voucher they recovered from the office– everything that was Rs 500 and above, even agreement contracts with news agencies and other ordinary course matters. This is despite the fact that all bank statements were submitted diligently. Since the investigation was with the I-T Department in Noida, we had to appoint a Chartered Accountant there and engage more people in Bengaluru. You can imagine the kind of strain this puts on a small organization.”
In August 2021, TNM got one more notice, the I-T Department wanted Dhanya to explain whether she had received a bribe from a mining baron called Shekhar Reddy. They had attached a story from a Telugu media website based on tweets by several journalists including Dhanya.
“To cut a long story short, a few years ago the purported diary of Shekhar Reddy was leaked by the I-T Department and it was alleged that he had paid several AIADMK politicians. It became a huge story but within a few hours, the AIADMK retaliated by targeting a few journalists who reported on the story. The party put out morphed pictures of the same diary, supposedly making it look like a few journalists received money too. But the person who made this morphed document had forgotten that the real diary was from a few years ago and that most journalists mentioned were with different news organizations at the time. The glaring error in this fake document made it easy for us to prove that it was fake. At the time, the journalists who had been named in this so-called diary had all tweeted slamming the AIADMK for intimidating us this way,” she added.
In the meantime, Times Now had played a conversation with an AIADMK functionary then, who had admitted that the paper was fake. We found the old video and sent it to the I-T department. The issues began in 2018 and after three years in September 2021, they closed the case against TNM, having found nothing illegal or incriminating.
“As TNM completes 8 years today, I wanted to tell this story to all. It isn’t easy to run a media organization in India, especially in the current political climate. All regimes discredit the media, some more than others. The constant trolling, the pressures, court cases, the lack of a proper revenue stream for small digital outlets, do keep us awake many nights. But at the end of the day, we love doing this. We know the role TNM plays, however small, in protecting the pillars of democracy, in discussing gender and caste politics,” Dhanya wrote.
This is just not the case with The News Minute, of the late government agencies are being used as a coercive tool to suppress free and independent journalism in the country. In July 2021, IT raids were conducted across several states against prominent media group Dainik Bhaskar as well as Uttar Pradesh-based TV channel Bharat Samachar for alleged tax evasion. The raids came against the backdrop of extensive reporting on the pandemic by Dainik Bhaskar, which was critical of the government’s gross mismanagement of the health sector and measures are taken to curb the pandemic. Bharat Samachar is one of the few channels that brought into light the state government’s pandemic mismanagement methods.
In February 2021, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had conducted raids at the office of Delhi based portal NewsClick.in, which had been at the forefront of reporting on the farmer’s agitation and the anti-CAA protests. Later in September 2021, IT raids were again conducted at the premises of NewsClick and another independent media organization Newslaundry to verify tax payments made by the portals.
Facing the wrath of government agencies despite being on the right side of the law when you are a budding organization without the backing of any major investors is a nightmare. Braving through their entanglement of legal notices and summons is an unimaginable and daunting task for any smaller organization. In the past, many had succumbed to such pressure. But if you choose to walk against such conditions, then every step you put forward will be a bed of thorns. It Is heartening to see TNM managed to brave the storm and march towards a better future.
