Mumbai: It had clocked an impressive 9.6 million views for its 1,500-plus videos, but in December 2024, Kannada news website The File’s YouTube channel went silent.
A producer and a video editor, each paid a monthly salary of Rs 30,000, were let go that month, and nothing new has been published on the digital video channel since. The File’s founder-editor, veteran investigative journalist G Mahantesh, told Article 14 he could no longer afford to pay retainers after the Income Tax department rescinded The File’s non-profit status in December 2024.
The department cancelled The File’s approvals for tax exemptions under sections 12 A (in relation to the income of a trust) and tax-deductible donations under 80G (relating to reducing a donor’s taxable income by the amount of the donation) of the Income Tax Act, 1961. “They called us a commercial site, an entertainment site,” said Mahantesh. “That is completely untrue.”
The File is a digital news magazine in Kannada, focusing its work on accountability in governance, government and public policy, using documents accessed often through the Right to Information Act, 2005. Funded only through donations and grants, The File hosted no advertising—not even Google Ads, a simple monetising tool for websites that host pay-per-click advertisements—nor any commercial content.
Mahantesh said he filed an appeal with the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, but did not know when a hearing would be granted. In the interim, he would be unable to pay contributors or editors.
“I’ll continue reporting and publishing investigative work,” he said. “The File will remain as long as I can continue my work.”
Among The File’s impactful investigations was a report on the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Karnataka allotting reserved land at a negligible price to a trust linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress leader S Siddaramaiah, then leader of opposition in the state Assembly and now chief minister, had used The File’s series of 50 stories to present to the state assembly data on expenditure irregularities.
The File is one of at least three not-for-profit Indian newsrooms effectively smothered since the second half of 2024 through tax authorities’ revocation of their preliminary non-profit status.
Unable to receive tax-free grants or donations, with no revenue model sound enough to pay staff, overheads, web-hosting costs, etc, and with the prospect of being asked to pay income tax and goods and services tax (GST) on contributions received until now, possibly with retrospective effect, all three face legal and financial uncertainty, and other constraints in continuing to work.
One of the others slapped with a similar suspension of non-profit status was The Reporters’ Collective, the latest to receive the Income-Tax department’s intimation. In a statement published on 28 January 2025, editors at The Reporters’ Collective said, “The order cancelling our non-profit status severely impairs our ability to do our work and worsens the conditions for independent public-purposed journalism in the country.”
‘Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts’
Since 2015-16, when journalists were called ‘presstitutes’ by a then cabinet minister, India’s small but resolute independent media, mostly bootstrapped, surviving on shoestring budgets, partly or fully funded by grants and donations, or with meagre revenue streams, have witnessed a wide assortment of attacks by the State.
Criminal cases have included charges of sedition, among other grave allegations (see here, here and here). A coercion to self-censor has led to top editors resigning over differences with owners (see here, here and here). The series of arrests and incarceration (see here, here and here), as well as income tax raids (see here, here, here, here and here), including a tax raid on the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF) that supports independent journalism across India, have continued relentlessly.
The latest, in the form of tax inspectors pronouncing whether one or more aspects of a news organisation’s activities constitute public purpose that merits the non-profit status, is a sophisticated, low-volume and gradual undermining of press freedoms, said one senior editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity to prevent drawing any attention to himself.
“It is death by a thousand paper-cuts,” said the editor, referring to coercive actions, such as a quiet rescinding of tax-exempt donations, or compliance requirements that cause small organisations to spend an inordinate amount of time and resources on paperwork and legal procedures.
All these actions sidestep the global outcry induced by arrests and tenuous cases against widely respected journalists, while still effectively slowing down or suspending the organisations’ reportage and investigations.
Targeted tax scrutiny, raids, regulatory or compliances-related action or other accusations regarding finances have been the basis for action against several Indian news organisations.
Reportage & Reaction
Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, which published a series of reports on the government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, faced tax raids in 2021. The BBC’s offices were raided by the income-tax department in 2023, soon after the British public broadcaster aired a documentary exploring prime minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in the Gujarat communal riots during his tenure as chief minister. On X (formerly Twitter), a senior advisor to the government of India’s ministry of information and broadcasting called the documentary “anti-India garbage”.
In 2020, one of Kashmir’s oldest newspapers, Kashmir Times, faced eviction from premises allotted by the state. In Bengaluru, the office of The News Minute was raided in relation to a case of alleged tax evasion against Raghav Bahl, founder of news website The Quint. In September 2020, the Mumbai office of digital news channel HW News was raided by the income tax department, a search that lasted 50 hours.
In 2019, NDTV founders Prannoy and Radhika Roy were stopped from boarding an international flight at the Mumbai airport, two years after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a case against them for alleged losses caused to a private bank in the foreclosure of a loan account.
A statement by NDTV, then owned by the Roys among others, said they had travelled abroad and returned to the country more than once since the case was filed; they had challenged the case in the Delhi High Court and the matter was pending at the time.
Some organisations that fund independent journalism projects in India through fellowships and grants, such as the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global collective of investigative journalists that has won a slew of awards for its work, and American-Hungarian billionaire George Soros-funded grant-making bodies, were accused in Parliament of trying to “destabilise” India
Only on 16 February, Tamil media group Vikatan said its website had been blocked after it carried in its digital magazine Vikatan Plus a cartoon of prime minister Modi with his wrists and ankles in shackles while seated across US President Donald Trump. The cartoon was an allusion to the mistreatment of Indians deported from the USA. In a social media post, the group said it was still to receive information on why the site was blocked.
In September 2022, the Independent And Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF) was subjected to a ‘survey’ by income-tax authorities. A statement by the organisation, funded by Indian philanthropists or their foundations including Azim Premji, Rohini Nilekani, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Anu Aga and others, was at pains to clarify that the IPSMF had received no foreign funding and had, in turn, only funded journalism organisations.
Cases Crumble Under Judicial Scrutiny
In several instances, government investigations against news organisations crumbled under judicial review.
In 2020, the Supreme Court dismissed an income-tax case against NDTV that accused the company of round-tripping finances through a foreign subsidiary. By December 2022, the Roys sold most of their shareholding in NDTV to the Adani Group.
In October 2024, the CBI told a Delhi court they had “insufficient legally admissible evidence” against the Roys in the case pertaining to the foreclosure of a loan from a private bank. Earlier, in 2023, the Delhi High Court ruled that the couple did not pose a flight risk and could travel abroad.
Newslaundry, which received about 55 income-tax notices over the years until March 2024, also received some favourable orders from courts. In 2022, a Delhi court dismissed three I-T complaints that claimed the company’s valuation was bogus. The case was “bereft of merit”, the court said.
Newslaundry received fresh notices from the I-T department as recently as 7 February 2025. CEO Abhinandan Sekhri posted on X (formerly Twitter), “I think we’re somewhere near 70 IT notices cos I stopped counting at 50.”
With a YouTube subscriber base of 2.17 million, Newslaundry also received funding in 2014-15 from impact investment firm Omidyar Network, run by e-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar and his family. The latter was among a handful of foreign organisations whose support to Indian entities was “restricted” in 2021, alongside civil society organisations Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Open Society Foundation.
Omidyar Network India exited the country in December 2024 citing a “change in context” and “growth in the economic landscape” in India, with more Indian philanthropic and venture capital available.
Laws Weaponised Against Journalists
What distinguishes the current regime from previous ones is that it is “not just intolerant but acting in a vindictive manner”, said Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta, a veteran journalist, writer and film-maker who has written extensively about the Adani Group’s businesses since 2015.
“This is how one explains the action against The Reporters’ Collective,” he told Article 14. “They have been targeted because of the stories they have done, the exposes that raked up muck about the working of this government.”
Among other subjects, The Reporters’ Collective conducted investigations into electoral bonds and ethnic violence in Manipur.
Guha-Thakurta said the government has used a combination of laws, law enforcing agencies and departments including the CBI, the police, the I-T department, the Enforcement Directorate, etc to target independent news organisations.
While Delhi Police claimed in 2022 that fact-checking website Alt News was being investigated for alleged violations of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), 2010, Kerala journalist Siddique Kappan, who spent 846 days in jail before being granted bail in February 2023, was charged under the draconian counter-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, (UAPA) and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.
“In the case of NewsClick, they used all of these,” Guha-Thakurta said.
NewsClick, an independent news organisation founded in 2009, had its offices and residences of senior staff raided by the Enforcement Directorate, the economic offences wing (EOW) of Delhi Police and the Income-Tax Department at various points of time since 2021.
Shortly after an August 2023 New York Times report alleged that the website had received funds from American millionaire Neville Roy Singham to spread “Chinese propaganda”, Indian authorities registered a case against NewsClick and its journalists on 17 August 2023.
NewsClick denied the charges. In a statement following the arrest of its founder and editor Prabir Purkayastha, the company said its devices, laptops, phones and other gadgets had been seized in the past, all their emails analysed, all bank statements, invoices, expenses and sources of funds received scrutinised. “Various directors and other related persons have spent countless hours on several occasions being interrogated by these government agencies,” it said.
A February 2021 raid had lasted over 38 hours, during which editors and management staff were prohibited from leaving the premises.
Purkayastha, 74, charged under the UAPA, spent 225 days incarcerated, his second stint in jail, having been arrested during protests against the Emergency in 1975.
“These laws existed earlier, but they’ve been really weaponised against the media now,” said Guha-Thakurta.
Towards the end of December 2023, NewsClick found its bank accounts frozen by authorities, rendering the company unable to make payments including salaries ahead of the year-end festive season. It called the situation an “administrative-legal siege”.
Following the raid, arrests and seizure of devices, publishing had slowed to 50% of the usual volume, with journalists having to borrow devices from friends to continue working.
A Global Decline In Media Freedom
Indian journalists’ and independent media outlets’ experience with repressive legal action is not an isolated occurrence, but part of a broader, well-documented global trend.
In May 2023, marking World Press Freedom Day at a United Nations event in New York, then administrator of the US Agency for International Aid (USAID) that now faces imminent closure, Samantha Powers, launched ‘Reporters’ Shield’, a scheme to assist journalists facing legal threats anywhere in the world.
She called these repressive measures “lawfare”, requiring media organisations or journalists to spend on legal fees, lawyers, etc. Her speech is no longer available on the USAID website, but a post by the agency on social publishing platform Medium cited her as saying journalists shouldn’t have to deal with “bankruptcy, bailiffs or bullets”.
In 2023, US-based advocacy group Freedom House said in its Freedom In The World report, a study of global trends in political rights and civil liberties conducted annually since 1973, that during 2022, media freedom had come under pressure in at least 157 countries and territories. Founded in 1941 to rally support for the fight against Nazi Germany and to raise awareness of fascist threats to democracy, Freedom House said that over the previous 17 years, the number of countries and territories that received a score of 0 on its media freedom indicator had ballooned from 14 to 33.
Separately, in a 2019 report on media freedoms across the world, Freedom House found that 19% of the countries it studied had endured a reduction in their press freedom scores over five years.
It said populist leaders in even the “most influential democracies in the world” had worked to throttle the free press. Instead of being thrown in jail, it said, “…the media have fallen prey to more nuanced efforts to throttle their independence. Common methods include government-backed ownership changes, regulatory and financial pressure, and public denunciations of honest journalists.”
Such a decline in press freedoms and rising instances of self-censorship, said Meenakshi Ganguly, Asia deputy director of advocacy group Human Rights Watch, were key indicators of a rise in authoritarianism.
“India could once proudly boast of its independent and feisty civil society, including the media, where varying opinions, including the ideology that the present BJP government promotes, found free expression,” Ganguly told Article 14. “Now, unfortunately, we find little room for dissent, including the crackdown on independent, public-spirited journalism organisations.”
She said this tends to limit people’s ability to access independent reporting about the activities of the government. “… UN human rights experts have repeatedly said that accountability and transparency, and a means to encourage the exchange of diverse views, underscores the importance of journalism as a public good.”
Public Investment In A Public Good
In its statement regarding the outcome of the loss of its non-profit status, The Reporters’ Collective said the move was suggestive of the tax department’s view that their work—investigative journalism that holds the powerful accountable—does not serve a public purpose.
“We at The Reporters’ Collective continue to believe that journalism, when done right, is an essential public service for our democracy. Journalism done right is a public good,” it said.
On the idea of journalism as a public good—that requires public investment, like other public goods—Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz suggested in a 2021 paper titled ‘The Media: Information As Public Good’ that, among other things, such public support could include a dismantling of monopolies or oligopolies in the media.
India, which by one estimate will be the world’s fifth-largest TV advertising market by 2026, has witnessed the opposite. NDTV and The Quint, both beleaguered by coercive action by State agencies, were bought by the Adani Group as it built a new media empire to match Reliance’s.
India has 922 private satellite TV channels registered with the ministry of information and broadcasting as of March 2024, as many as 333 broadcasters, and 388 private FM radio channels. Registered print publications numbered 146,045 in March 2022, including 20,821 newspapers.
Yet, the Media Ownership Monitor, a global research and advocacy initiative, found in 2019 that a large number of media outlets does not necessarily translate into a pluralistic media landscape. Their data, collected for India in partnership with Delhi-based digital media and technology company DataLEADS in 2018-19, suggested the opposite—“a significant trend towards concentration and, ultimately, control of content and public opinion”.
Reliance’s major strides in the media industry began less than two decades ago. Five years after its 2012 agreement with Network18, at the Reliance group’s 42nd annual general body meeting in 2019, Mukesh Ambani said the company owned 72 television channels reaching 800 million Indians, representing more than 95% of TV-viewing Indians. That included their TV news channels, which he said enjoyed the largest regional footprint, ratings and revenues. That was long before Disney and Reliance Industries’ $ 8.5 billion merger of their Indian media assets in 2024.
The Adani group forayed into media business only around 2021, but quickly acquired Quintillion Business Media (which runs BQ Prime), NDTV and newswire IANS.
Journalism As Public Service
A 2022 UNESCO report ‘Journalism Is a Public Good: World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development’ explored how to create a viable environment for journalism to function as a public good including through increasing official state assistance without political interference.
This report, too, said that despite growing plurality in media formats and news producers, economic challenges posed fundamental questions about the durability of doing journalism in these organisations.
“Most public goods require public investment in order to provide the services valued by citizens,” said the UNESCO report. “Journalism with a public service mission is no different.”
Sharene Azimi, communications director at the US-based Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), said it was addressing concerns among media organisations across the US about President Donald Trump's promise to exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him.
“Now, just weeks into the new administration, newsrooms are increasingly worried about libel lawsuits, harassment of their reporters and other threats—which may come from both government and private sector actors,” Azimi told Article 14.
The INN, a network that supports more than 475 independent news organisations across the world, has created an online press freedom and safety hub to help make resources accessible to its nonprofit newsroom members, including help with legal, digital and physical threats. An example of a tool that helps journalists be prepared for investigative stories that pose a higher risk of backlash could be ProJourn, Azimi said, which brings seasoned media attorneys to provide journalists legal help at no cost.
Media owners and top editors across the world have taken note of the deepening crisis. A G Sulzberger, the New York Times’s publisher, in an op-ed published by the paper’s main rival The Washington Post on 5 September 2024, alluded to the “quiet war” against press freedoms and the anti-media “playbook” of the Trump administration. In preparation for what is to come, he wrote tellingly, his colleagues and he spent months studying how press freedoms were attacked in Hungary, “as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil”.
The 2019 Freedom House report on media freedoms said it was now “painfully apparent” that a free press cannot be taken for granted, not even in countries where democratic rule has been in place for decades.
Stiglitz’s closing lines from his 2021 paper on media could be a corollary: “Creating an effective media is one of the most important challenges of the time,” he wrote. “The failure to do so will have large consequences for our democracies, our economies, and our societies.”
(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)
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