New Delhi: A day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted raids and arrests of employees of News Click- a news site that is literally a red rag for the Centre, students at Jantar Mantar, journalists at Press Club of India, lawyers in between and concerned citizens everywhere came out to say this shall not pass.
“The invocation of UAPA is especially chilling. Journalism cannot be prosecuted as terrorism”, read President of the Press Club of India, Gautum Lahiri as he read out a letter to Chief Justice of India (CJI) D.Y. Chandrachud from several significant journalist bodies across the nation.
“Just as the police are obliged by the Constitution to state the grounds of arrest, it must be equally be a precondition to questioning. In its absence, as we have seen in the NewsClick case, vague assertions about the investigation of some of the unspecified offenses have become the grounds for questioning journalists about their coverage of inter alia, the farmer’s movement, the government’s handling of the COVID pandemic, and the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act”, he further read out loud.
Author Arundhati Roy, academicians Mukul Kesavan, Mridula Mukherjee, Ramachandra Guha, and Zoya Hasan, are some of the leading faces of Delhi’s activist vanguard present at the Press Club on Wednesday along with student groups and trade unions.
The protest comes after NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha and HR Head Amit Chakravarty have been sent to police custody for seven days. A case has been filed under UAPA after allegations were posed on the portal to support Chinese propaganda. Sixteen journalist bodies gathered at Jantar Mantar to stage protest against the arrest and wrote to the CJI.