From Bhima Koregaon to NewsClick

Members of media organisations protest against the Delhi police’s raids on journalists affiliated with NewsClick, in Mumbai, on September 5. Pic/Atul Kamble

The Bombay High Court began hearing last week the petitions of professor-activist Shoma Sen and researcher-activist Rona Wilson, two among the 16 booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in the Bhima Koregaon case. Their plea is that the chargesheets against them should be quashed as the prosecution evidence against them was fabricated and planted on electronic devices the police seized.

Also last week, the Supreme Court began hearing the petitions challenging the arrest of NewsClick's founder-editor Prabir Purkayastha and its Human Resources head Amit Chakraborty. They were arrested under an FIR that invoked the UAPA. From Bhima Koregaon to NewsClick, India continues its journey through a hell called UAPA, on a path that deviates little.

The seizure of electronic devices in the Bhima Koregaon case took place after one Tushar Damgude filed a complaint, on January 8, 2018, at the Vishrambaug police station, Pune. Damgude said the cultural performances at the Elgar Parishad, held on December 31, 2017, were provocative, and designed to implement the Maoist policy of inciting the "backward class" to resort to violence at the celebration to mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon. Incredible for an ordinary citizen to know that!

In March 2018, police officer Shivaji Pawar filed an application in a Pune Sessions Court requesting it to issue warrants for searching the premises of the six people against whom Damgude had complained, plus activist Rona Wilson and lawyer Surendra Gadling. In the application, Pawar said "secret information was received from a credible source" that Sudhir Dhawale, an organiser of the Elgar Parishad, Wilson and Gadling worked for the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

The FIR against NewsClick, like Pawar's application, says "secret inputs" were received that foreign entities illegally pumped funds into India to disrupt its sovereignty and integrity. NewsClick, the FIR alleges, received crores of rupees.

Back to Bhima Koregaon: after the Sessions Court rejected Pawar's application, the Pune Police invoked a section of the Criminal Procedure Code and raided, on April 17, 2018, the premises of the eight people against whom search warrants were applied for. Their electronic devices were seized. None of them was given a hash value, a unique number guaranteeing the authenticity of a data-set stored on a device. Any tampering with the data changes the hash value.

Sen was raided and arrested on June 6; she, too, wasn't given hash values for the electronic devices the police took away from her. Subsequently, Arsenal Consultancy, a digital forensic company, issued reports showing that documents were planted on the devices of Wilson, Gadling and Father Stan Swamy. It was on the basis of the documents allegedly extracted from their devices that the police had arrested Sen and 15 others.

Now, turn to NewsClick, which was being investigated, since 2021, for allegedly receiving ‘Chinese money' to the tune of R38 crore. A large part of this money to NewsClick actually came as direct foreign investment from Worldwide Media Holdings LLC, which is owned by People's Support Foundation Limited, established with funds American businessperson Neville Roy Singham donated from the proceeds he received by selling his company ThoughtWorks.

On August 5, The New York Times published report titled ‘A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul', which said Singham was bankrolling media outlets in order to promote Chinese propaganda. Singham claimed the NYT did not carry his rebuttals in full, and Jason Pfetcher, the Foundation's board member, said his statement was not even featured.

All hell broke loose in India, for the NYT had accused NewsClick of "sprinkling its coverage with Chinese government talking points". But the evidence it provided was just one video, which was on China's history being an inspiration for the working classes. This thin evidence places the NYT story on as slippery a ground as anyone who would claim that Mara Hvistendahl, the lead author of the story on Singham, appears to have played the game of USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the grounds that she once accessed the agency's documents to write a page-turner, ‘The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI and Industrial Espionage'. A fortnight after the NYT published its story, the Delhi Police registered the FIR against NewsClick.

In the Bhima Koregaon case, the Maoists were accused of funding the accused to incite Dalits to destabilise Indian democracy - not too different from the FIR against the NewsClick editor and others, who are alleged to have used illegal foreign funds to abet and prolong the farmer protest, with the aim of destroying public property and disrupting supplies essential for community life.

Over 80 staffers of NewsClick were raided on October 3, and their electronic devices were seized. They were not given hash values. Some did indeed have the police teams write that they seized laptops and hard discs without electronically securing them. But tech experts say it is easy to backdate a document for inserting it on an unsecured electronic device. Would NewsClick staffers discover documents they had never possessed ascribed to them, as Sen and Wilson claim happened with them? The gods of the hell named UAPA do know a few tricks.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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