The Delhi Police have levelled a wide range of charges in their First Information Report (FIR) against NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha, American millionaire Neville Roy Singham, and activist Gautam Navlakha, a shareholder of NewsClick who is presently under house arrest as accused in a terror case. These three individuals have been named as the accused in the FIR. Some of the charges are: conspiring to provide legal aid to Chinese telecom companies such as Xiaomi and Vivo, which are facing tax evasion cases in India; acting against national interest by promoting a false narrative against India’s pharmaceutical industry and the policies of the government in cohort with “anti-national forces”; inciting, supporting, and funding the farmers’ agitation, with the objective of creating law and order problems and causing a “huge loss of several hundred crores to the Indian economy”; and publishing news funded by money clandestinely routed from China. The FIR said that “secret inputs” showed that Mr. Purkayastha, Mr. Singham, and some other Chinese employees of Star Stream, owned by Mr. Singham, exchanged mails which exposed their intent to show Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh “as not part of India.” and to “peddle a narrative, both globally and domestically, that Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh are disputed territories”. The FIR also accused Mr. Purkayastha of conspiring with a group named the People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism to sabotage the electoral process during the 2019 general election. On October 3, the Delhi police arrested Mr. Purkayastha and NewsClick human resources head Amit Chakraborty, and have also questioned more than 40 journalists, contributors, a satirist, and consultants linked to the news portal over the past three days. On October 4, NewsClick denied allegations of publishing Chinese propaganda. Mr. Singham, an American citizen who currently lives in Shanghai, and whose foundation has invested in NewsClick, is not known to face any legal or criminal case in the U.S.
NewsClick’s investor Worldwide Media Holdings has said that it “strictly followed all aspects of Indian law” before investing in the news portal in 2018, and that false allegations continue to circulate, despite all the facts it had given to the Indian authorities. Jason Pfetcher, a U.S based lawyer, said People’s Support Foundation (PSF) was created in 2017 by funds donated from the sale of ThoughtWorks, an IT consultancy firm founded by Mr. Singham. Mr. Pfetcher said he is the manager of PSF that wholly owns and operates WMH, a for-profit investment vehicle which has made various investments in progressive media projects around the world. He said he had attended various shareholder meetings of NewsClick but none of the principals of PSF or WMH had ever influenced, guided, or directed its journalistic work. “It appears that much of the basis for this action by the Indian government stems from a slanderous article that was published by The New York Times on August 5. Before that article was published, I responded to the reporters’ questions on behalf of PSF as follows: ‘PSF has never received any funding, nor taken direction from any foreign individual, organization, political party, or government (or from any of their members or representatives).’ The New York Times failed to include PSF’s categorical denial of foreign funding, and instead left readers to believe that the source of PSF’s funding (or Mr. Singham’s for that matter) might have come from China, rather than from the sale of ThoughtWorks. Their salacious headlines and misleading ‘reporting’ have now directly contributed to the arrest of innocent journalists,” he said. In an editorial after the arrests, The Hindu said the “actions seem driven by an impulse to scapegoat a media outlet and to bring about, therefore, a chilling effect on critical journalism. No government can or should so brazenly target journalists solely based on suspicion about its funding and thereby undermine the freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under the Constitution.”
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