New Delhi/Mumbai: The Delhi Police Crime Branch have conducted search and seizure operations at the homes of founding editors of a news portal The Wire, pursuant to a Section 91 notice under the Code of Criminal Procedure.
The raids continued on the residences of senior editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, M K Venu and Sidharth Bhatia, deputy editor, Jahnavi Sen and product-cum-business head, Mithun Kidambi, in New Delhi and Mumbai on the October 31 evening and early today morning.
The raids followed a First Information Report (FIR) registered in New Delhi on the basis of a complaint filed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) National Information and Technology department in-charge Amit Malviya. The charges pertained to cheating, forgery, defamation and criminal conspiracy.
Malviya’s complaint was filed soon after The Wire formally retracted its stories on the XCheck program of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, in which it was alleged that special status was given to Bharatiya Janata Party leaders to takedown content on these platforms. In a statement dated October 23, 2022, The Wire retracted these stories after an internal review revealed discrepancies.
In an editorial statement on October 27, the news portal admitted that “complex technical evidence – whether brought by someone who is part of the newsroom or a freelancer – and all verification processes that involve technical skill, must be cross-checked by independent and reputed experts in the field. Had we done this before publication rather than after the fact, this would have ensured that the deception to which we were subjected by a member of our Meta investigation team* was
spotted in time.”
Condemning the raids on the news portal, the Brihanmumbai Union of Journalists (BUJ) today deplored the act of the Crime Branch taking away devices from the news portal’s New Delhi office without providing any hash value, i.e., the numeric value that uniquely identifies data lodged in an electronic device at any given point in time.
“We also strongly feel that that this latest attack on The Wire should not be seen in isolation. This is not just an attack on critics of the present regime and freedom of speech. The raids are an integral part of the Make in India spectacle where all dissent is “anti-national” and all struggle a species of “urban Naxalism’. The Indian state is visibly tightening the noose and the crony capitalists are loudly clapping,” the BUJ stated.
Without “glossing over The Wire’s lapse”, the BUJ though recalled that in the recent past there had been “numerous instances” of media excesses and completely over-the-top stories by media houses: be it absurd reports of chips in currency notes; fake WhatsApp forwards on Chinese soldiers killed in Galwan or unalloyed hate-mongering and incitement. “These “reports” have enjoyed complete immunity and have hurtled India into a post-Truth conjuncture, where the right to be reliably informed itself has been steadily jettisoned,” it noted and stated that in this context, The Wire’s retraction of the stories and the promise of an
internal review of editorial lapses were in the “best traditions” of the principles of self-regulation.
“That The Wire’s admission of lapses was quickly seized upon by the BJP as well as the Delhi police to conduct raids is highly regrettable and deplorable. Clearly, vendetta politics is at play here, given The Wire’s reputation as an independent and critical news portal,” the BUJ stated.
– global bihari bureau
