The Hindu has urged the Gujarat Police to drop charges of allegedly possessing confidential documents against its Ahmedabad correspondent Mahesh Langa.
Suresh Nambath, the editor of the newspaper, said that filing such cases against reporters undermines their journalistic work and fundamental rights.
On October 22, the Gujarat Police registered a first information report against Langa for allegedly possessing confidential government documents about the Gujarat Maritime Board. The case was filed when the journalist was already in judicial custody in an alleged Goods and Services Tax-related scam.
Nambath on Saturday said that journalists, in the line of their work, are required to process documents, including those of a confidential nature. “They are guided by the larger public interest in perusing documents that are official or confidential,” he said in a series of posts on X.
Nambath also described as “completely unacceptable” the statement of District Superintendent of Police Ravi Teja Vasamsetty that the online first information report was not accessible to the public as it had been put under the "sensitive" category.
N Ram, the director of The Hindu Publishing Group, also said he supported journalists’ right to obtain and process confidential or “sensitive” official documents in the line of their work. “If journalists are imprisoned or otherwise penalised for obtaining and analysing such documents, much of investigative reporting would become extinct,” he remarked.
The first case against Langa pertains to allegations that a company named Dhruvi Enterprise created six firms from a single Permanent Account Number to fraudulently receive input tax credit.
One of the companies named in the first information report, DA Enterprise, is owned by Mahesh Langa’s cousin Manoj Langa. The journalist’s wife is a silent partner in the firm with no rights to conduct transactions or access bank accounts.
Manoj Langa, however, has allegedly claimed that he was instructed by Mahesh Langa to carry out fraudulent transactions.
The journalist’s counsel told an Ahmedabad court earlier this month that his client was neither a director nor a promoter of the company, and that the police had not found any transactions directly tying him to the alleged scam.
Mahesh Langa was arrested on October 7 and is now in judicial custody at Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Central Jail.
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