On October 3, 2023, five hundred Delhi Police officers fanned across India’s capital to raid and detain almost a hundred journalists and researchers. The Delhi Police — which is under the authority of India’s Ministry of Home Affairs — seized laptops, cell phones, and hard drives. The central target of this massive assault on the media was Newsclick, a news website founded in 2009. At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Newsclick’s founder and chief editor, Prabir Purkayastha, and its human relations chief, Amit Chakravarty.

One issue, among others, had the Delhi Police investigators fixated: the Indian farmers’ movement, which culminated in a massive protest between 2020 and 2021. The police asked the journalists if they had covered this protest, when farmers occupied the roads into Delhi in protest of three laws passed by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If they covered these protests, the police asked, were they given a bonus by their employer, Newsclick? The interrogations were blunt and harsh. The focus was on what they had covered — particularly the farmers’ movement and the Indian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — not on any infringements of the law by the journalists or Newsclick. In case there is any misunderstanding, while Article 19 (1) of the Indian Constitution does not mention the press directly, it offers Indian citizens “freedom of speech and expression.” This is notwithstanding the fact that India has slipped to 161 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index (2023). The Delhi Police’s intimidation of these journalists justifies India’s low position on this index.

Shortly after the arrest, the police’s First Information Report (FIR) — which the judiciary used to justify the arrest of Purkayastha and Chakravarty — laid out the argument used to bring the two men into custody. The FIR is a hallucinatory document, which fails to clearly lay out the crimes of those arrested. Newsclick reacted strongly to the FIR, calling it “ex facie untenable and bogus.” One of the most hostile claims is that Newsclick is funded by private and governmental Chinese money. As the publication said categorically, “Newsclick has not received any funding or instructions from China or Chinese entities.” In fact, shortly after Newsclick made this assertion, Jason Pfetcher released a statement on behalf of Worldwide Media Holdings, which had made the 2019 investment in Newsclick; Worldwide Media Holdings, Pfetcher said, is funded by money from the sale of an IT company to Apax Partners of the United Kingdom. The claim of Chinese money is part of the New Cold War mentalité, ungrounded in the facts.