Income Tax searches were carried out this morning at numerous offices of the media company Dainik Bhaskar around the country. According to reports, the group has been accused of tax evasion.
In Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, taxmen raided the offices of Dainik Bhaskar. According to sources, the promoters’ houses and offices were also seized.
Raids were underway at Dainik Bhaskar’s offices in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, and Indore, according to a senior editor.
The opposition alleged that the group was raided because of its reporting on Covid “mismanagement” by the government. Congress leader and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh said on Twitter that tax officials “are present” at half-a-dozen premises of the group, including at its office at Press Complex in state capital Bhopal.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh also attacked BJP through his tweet “Through its reporting Dainik Bhaskar has exposed the Modi regime’s monumental mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now paying the price. An Undeclared Emergency as Arun Shourie has said – this is a Modified Emergency”.
One of the largest newspaper groups in the country, the Dainik Bhaskar was at the forefront of reporting on the scale of devastation in the second wave of Covid in April-May.
Dainik Bhaskar put out a series of reports that took a critical look at official claims during the pandemic as raging infections left people desperate for oxygen, hospital beds and vaccine.
Its reportage exposed the grisly sight of bodies of Covid victims floating in the river Ganga and washing up on the banks of towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, possibly discarded because of the lack of means to cremate them. The reports also revealed bodies buried in shallow graves by the river in UP.
The New York Times had, a month ago, published Dainik Bhaskar editor Om Gaur’s op-ed on Covid deaths in India, titled: “The Ganges Is Returning the Dead. It Does Not Lie.” The opinion piece was extremely critical of the government’s handling of the coronavirus peak. The holiest of India’s rivers “became Exhibit A for the Modi administration’s failures and deceptions”, he wrote.
