Indian tax officers swept the BBC’s offices in Mumbai and New Delhi February 13, weeks after a documentary that was critical of the prime minister's role in decades-old riots was deleted from Indian social media.
The income tax administration is authorized to enter the BBC’s premises under section 133A of the Indian Income Tax Act, former Income Tax Chief Commissioner R.K. Yadav said in a video published by the Times of India. That provision allows representatives of the tax authority to conduct a “survey” and access a business’s premises during regular business hours to collect information in an ongoing tax inspection.
The powers under section 133A are quite broad, Yadav said. “Under the act, the reason [for the survey] could be transfer pricing, [tax deducted at source], determination of income, claim of expenditure, and so on and so forth. It’s quite wide,” Yadav added.
According to unidentified sources, the BBC’s premises in New Delhi were surveyed because of the U.K. broadcasting company's "deliberate noncompliance with the transfer pricing rules and its vast diversion of profits,” news website Firstpost reported.
“The income tax authorities cannot seize anything during a survey,” Yadav said. “The objective of the income tax authorities under the survey powers is never to hamper any business activity.”
The survey came only weeks after a U.K. television documentary titled India: The Modi Question spotlighted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, when he was chief minister of that state.
In a January 21 tweet, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, called the program "hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage disguised as ‘documentary.’" He added that "tweets sharing links to the BBC documentary have been blocked under India’s sovereignty laws and rules.”
On February 14 the BBC tweeted that it was fully cooperating with the authorities’ survey. "We hope to have this situation resolved as soon as possible," it said.
“The raid at BBC’s offices reeks of desperation and shows that the Modi government is scared of criticism," K.C. Venugopal, general secretary of the opposition Congress Party, tweeted February 14. “We condemn these intimidation tactics in the harshest terms. This undemocratic and dictatorial attitude cannot go on any longer."
Gaurav Bhatia, a spokesman from Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, described the BBC as the "most corrupt organization in the world." Further, the government did not order the tax authorities to conduct the survey, he said in a February 14 statement. “Why can’t the opposition party be more patient and wait for the [tax authorities’] report to come out?” he asked. If a taxpayer is “following the law of the country and has nothing to hide, why then be so afraid of an action that it is per law?"
The international nonprofit organization Reporters Without Borders ranks India 150th out of 180 countries in a global ranking for press freedom.