Analysis

Marginalia: On NewsClick, NYT, toolkits, etc.

VM

07 Oct 2023 — 3 min read

The Bharatiya Janata Party in power in India knows that the process is the punishment, that the amount of punishment imposed depends on the law invoked in the chargesheet, and that no law is as ripe for misuse in this regard as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) 1967. In fact, simply invoking the law and using the police to intimidate, arrest, and harass may be the state's goal, rather than the eventual verdict itself, which is also unlikely to be in the state's favour.

The latest recipients of this form of the state's justice have been the news organisation NewsClick and its employees, including editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha. Even getting bail under (UAPA) is difficult because the Act locks away the conditions that need to be met to secure bail in a cage of vague statements, all of which a committed state can interpret to suit its agenda.

NewsClick has been accused of funding terror and its editor of conspiring to redraw India's sovereign borders. During the police raids of NewsClick's employees and office that preceded the arrests, journalists also said that they were asked if they had covered and/or commented on social media platforms on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and the three farm laws in 2020-2021.

So using the excuse of the The New York Times article, whose careless journalism opened a big hole for the Indian government to crawl through, the state initiated the raids; using the UAPA's repurposable provisions, the state arrested NewsClick's journalists, seized their phones, laptops, and whatever other records were kept at its office, and kept them in the dark; and using the opportunity to deploy the police as an excuse, the state intimidated the journalists into sharing something – anything – that would allow the police to build even a minimally legitimate case.

This is the same template the police followed after BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya filed cheating and defamation cases against The Wire for its Meta reports, based on which the police raided the houses of people not even named on the FIR and seized The Wire's human-resources and financial records and its employees' personal information.

This is the toolkit: Find a hole, crawl in, seize everything, try to build a case, and extend police custody.

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