After the NewsClick case was front-page news across major English newspapers yesterday, media houses kept the momentum going with editorials slamming the government.

The news portal’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and HR head Amit Chakravarty were arrested on October 3 in a UAPA case filed against NewsClick and sent to seven days in police custody. The Delhi police also searched the homes of 46 journalists and others who were connected to the news portal, and seized mobile phones and other devices.

Business Standards’ editorial, headlined “Beyond due process”, said that the invocation of the UAPA against NewsClick executives and the manner of the raids against journalists was an “overreaction”, and “epitomise all the public misgivings” about the recently passed Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the planned reforms of the criminal procedure laws.

It said “question is whether the state has followed due process”. “The arrests and interrogations under the UAPA, in which bail conditions are stringent, have disrupted the course of due process and appear to be an extreme response…”  

It further said that “doubts about the arm’s length nature of this week’s action have arisen” on account of the nature of interrogations by the Delhi police, and the latest actions “make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the state is seeking to stifle critics with the full might of its coercive laws”.

The Hindu’s editorial this morning was headlined “Undeclared Emergency”.

“Even for a government that has shown itself to be intolerant of critical journalism, the actions by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led regime on the news website NewsClick smack of extreme vendetta and brazen harassment,” the editorial said. It pointed out the government still hasn’t disclosed specific allegations or NewsClick content linked to “Chinese propaganda” or “terror”.

It said: “Mr Purkayastha was arrested and kept in jail during the Emergency in 1975 under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act, on trumped up charges, when he was a student-activist at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Today, history seems to be repeating itself, but without even the fig leaf of a declared Emergency.”

The police had issued a statement saying they had questioned “suspects” in the case. In its editorial today, Indian Express said this was “guilt presumed by association”,  raising “grave questions about press freedom, a crucial part of the citizens’ fundamental right to know”.

It also noted that NewsClick had been given high court protection after it was raided by the Enforcement Directorate in 2021.

“Invoking the UAPA and the police action Tuesday is a flagrant attempt to cut through due process, and escape the checks built into it for protecting freedoms against a transgressing state,” Indian Express said. “...While the case related to NewsClick’s funding must take its course, it must do so by giving primacy to due process. The state should not brazenly wrest more power to circumvent restraints under a stringent law...”

Telegraph’s editorial, headlined “Another blow”, said Modi’s self-declared support for press freedom has “acquired McCarthian dimensions of repression and persecution”.

“The violation of procedure and privacy is not the only concern here. The police had allegedly planted hostile evidence in a laptop in the Bhima-Koregaon case that witnessed the incarceration of several activists and intellectuals,” the editorial said.

The newspaper noted that assaults on the media follow a familiar and “dispiriting” script.

“It is time for a concerted effort to project the threat to the Indian media as a collective threat. There must be a public campaign to raise awareness that the weakening and the corresponding transformation of the media into cheerleaders of the regime have serious repercussions for the rights of both the nation and its citizens.”

Deccan Chronicle said it’s “imperative that the government uncover the funding trail” and then prosecute if “found to be on the wrong side of the law”. “But that does not appear to be the case. The ED has not come into the picture as yet; it is the Delhi police doing the job. What was it that the ED was investigating all these years? Is this not pure and simple harassment?”

Given that NewsClick “took positions that were at variance” with the government on issues like the farmer protests and the Citizenship Amendment Act, Deccan Chronicle’s editorial said: “Is this not an attempt to muzzle the media?...Media organisations work to inform people, not to terrorise them. What is the rationale for the agencies to slap the anti-terror law on the key employees of a news portal?”

These were questions asked yesterday too, when journalists, writers and activists gathered at the Press Club of India in New Delhi to protest the police action against NewsClick. Read about it here.