Spokesperson: Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi: He said that Friends, we are raising the core issue - freedom, fairness, thought of expression, especially of the press establishing correlation with the report by the newspaper ‘Dainik Bhaskar’. Look at the following points: 1. Dainik Bhaskar put out a series of reports that took a critical look at official claims during the pandemic as raging infections left people desperate for oxygen, hospital beds and vaccine. 2. Its reportage exposed the grisly sight of bodies of Covid victims floating in the river Ganga and washing up on the banks of towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, possibly discarded because of the lack of means to cremate them. The reports also revealed bodies buried in shallow graves by the river in UP.
3. The New York Times had, a month ago, published Dainik Bhaskar editor Om Gaur’s op-ed on Covid deaths in India, titled: “The Ganges is Returning the Dead. It Does not Lie.” The opinion piece was extremely critical of the government’s handling of the coronavirus peak. The holiest of India’s rivers “became Exhibit A for the Modi administration’s failures and deceptions”, he wrote. 4. After the taid, on the website of the Dainik Bhaskar, the group has stated that “scared of its coverage of floating dead bodies in the river Ganges during the pandemic, the government launched raids on the Bhaskar group.” 5. More recently, Bhaskar was the only Hindi daily to cover the revelations that prominent opposition leaders, journalists, bureaucrats and activists in India had been snooped on using the Israeli spyware Pegasus. “Spying in India: 40 journalists, 3 opposition leaders, 2 ministers, one judge in the first list,” the paper reported on the frontpage. So, the government must tell whether the income tax raids are well-planned or just a coincidence? Thursday, July 22, 2021