UK foreign minister takes up issue of BBC office raid with Indian counterpart S Jaishankar

Jaishankar, however, defended the surveys conducted by the tax authorities at the BBC offices, saying rules have to be complied with

The government of the United Kingdom on Wednesday formally conveyed to New Delhi its concerns over the recent raids by the tax officials at the British Broadcasting Corporation’s offices in India.

The issue came up during a bilateral meeting between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his counterpart in the UK government, James Cleverly, in New Delhi. Cleverly, according to the sources, conveyed to Jaishankar the concerns of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government over the raids conducted by the officials of the Income Tax department at the offices of the BBC in Mumbai and New Delhi.

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Jaishankar, however, defended the surveys conducted by the tax authorities at the BBC offices in India. He reportedly told Cleverly that all entities must comply fully with the relevant laws and regulations while operating in India, added the sources.

The Income Tax department claimed that the three-day survey at the BBC offices uncovered irregularities. It claimed that the income and profits disclosed by the broadcaster were “not commensurate with the scale of operations in India”. It also alleged that the survey indicated that tax had not been paid on certain remittances which had not been disclosed by the BBC as income in India.

Cleverly is on a visit to New Delhi to attend the meeting of the G20 Foreign Ministers, which Jaishankar will host on Thursday.

The raids were conducted just a few weeks after the broadcaster drew flak from the Government of India and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for airing a documentary titled “India: The Modi Question”. The first part of the documentary focussed on the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 and the role of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had then held the office of the chief minister of the state. It claimed that a probe by the diplomats of the UK after the 2002 communal clashes in Gujarat had found that Modi, who had been the chief minister of the state then, had been “directly responsible” for the “systematic campaign of violence”.

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The Government of India dismissed the BBC documentary as a propaganda designed to push a discredited narrative. It also used emergency powers under the Information Technology rules 2021 to block multiple clips of the BBC documentary on YouTube and Twitter.

The second part of the documentary focussed on the relations between the Modi Government at the Centre and the minority community of the country since 2014.

The raids at the BBC offices were discussed even at the UK parliament, where opposition members raised the issue and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government in response stressed on the importance of the broadcaster to have “editorial freedom”. “We stand up for the BBC. We fund the BBC. We think the BBC World Service is vital. We want the BBC to have that editorial freedom," said David Rutley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the British Government. “That freedom is key, and we want to be able to communicate its importance to our friends across the world, including the government in India," Rutley said in the UK parliament on February 21.