“Fewer and fewer people want to speak, and for good reason: there are consequences,” says Vrinda Grover, a human rights lawyer practising in India’s Supreme Court. Even as the country moves to portray itself as a counterweight to an increasingly authoritarian China, rumours of self-censorship extend to people in business, with potentially harmful consequences for the development of the world’s fifth-biggest economy. Lawyers, journalists and activists say they see editors and reporters increasingly pulling their punches on topics that risk landing them in trouble. But the pressure on unfettered speech in the world’s largest democracy is palpable. India’s clamorous public square and disquisitive journalistic and intellectual culture has been a point of pride for many citizens. “It immediately cloaks what is essentially a political attack and has been used against civil society and opposition politicians . . . Once you raise the spectre of corruption, it’s easier to get public opinion to fall in line.” “There seems to be a new strategy of claiming financial impropriety - not just for journalists, but for other civil society organisations,” says Naresh Fernandes, co-founder and editor of Scroll, a news website. All three organisations declined to comment for this story. While the IPSMF supports independent news outlets that have faced intensifying legal and public pressure since prime minister Modi took power in 2014, Oxfam India and the CPR have no such connections. Yet it was the nature of the groups targeted this time that sent a chill through civil society.
In 2020, Amnesty International was forced to suspend its operations in India after its bank accounts were frozen following the human rights group’s criticism of Narendra Modi’s government. The crackdown was not uncommon for India, where fiscal and law enforcement agencies are known for conducting regular - and, critics say, overzealous or politically motivated - searches of individuals and organisations, from opposition politicians to Chinese smartphone makers. Oxfam said the tax team removed hundreds of pages of data pertaining to its finances and programmes, and cloned its server.
During what Oxfam described in a statement as “35-plus hours of nonstop survey”, staff were not allowed to leave the building, the internet was cut off and their mobile phones confiscated.
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