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The Income Tax survey on the BBC’s offices in India was aimed at finding Indian collaborators to the broadcaster's documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the 2002 Gujarat riots. “It was completely produced abroad, so there was nothing to be found here,” according to a highly placed source with knowledge of the happenings at the BBC’s offices. The survey was wrapped up on February 16, Thursday night in the BBC's Mumbai office; while the operation at the UK broadcaster’s Delhi office will be wrapped up by Friday,
Another source said that the Income Tax Department will now follow up on the survey by looking into Transfer Pricing — “a highly subjective area of taxation. At best, this means the department can say that an X amount of money that was sent out of the country by the BBC’s India arm should have been taxed in India. If the BBC feels what the department is quoting is disproportionate, they can go to court over it,” the source explained.
However, the department has also copied the data from the phones of several top employees of BBC in both Delhi and Mumbai, and the information copied from these phones can be used to “find what they want to find,” the source said. They added that the government waited for the Parliament session to end to start the survey on BBC, and that the I-T officials were given strict instructions not to turn off any cameras at the BBC’s offices. “The unwritten rule is that no cameras are allowed during a survey, however the I-T officials in this operation were given strict instructions not to turn off cameras, so there are no questions raised about it,” they said.
Income Tax officials started the survey on the Delhi and Mumbai offices of British Broadcasting Corporation, which is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, on February 14. The I-T department’s action comes weeks after the BBC published a two-part documentary titled ‘India: The Modi Question’, which looked at then-Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots. The documentary was not officially released in India, however copies of the documentary were distributed widely on the internet, after which the Union government sought a ban on the documentary in the Supreme Court, which the court denied.
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