HUNDREDS of journalists signed a statement on Sunday condemning the "attack on press freedom” by Indian authorities cracking down on alternative media in the country.

This follows a raid by 500 Delhi police officers on October 3 on the homes and offices of journalists and researchers as part of a three-year nationwide campaign of intimidation against Newsclick by the governing right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narenda Modi.

Police officers harassed the journalists, demanding to know why they were covering the farmers’ movement and the government’s Covid-19 response. 

Computers, phones, documents and Network Attached Storage (NAS) units were seized from the Newsclick office. 

The NAS system contained 14 years of coverage by Newsclick, its entire archive.

The raids saw the arrest of Newsclick founder and chief editor Prabir Purkayastha and human relations head Amit Chakraborty, who both remain in prison under remand. 

One of the signatories, director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and chief correspondent at Globetrotter Vijay Prashad, a former employee at NewsClick, said: “The government is gagging the press. This is not a case about terrorism. This is a case about freedom of the press.”

Other signatories include Breno Altman from Brazil’s Opera Mundi, Jamal Ghosn of Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar, Stefan Huth of Germany’s Junge Welt and Zoe Alexandra of global network People’s Dispatch.

The signatories said they stood in “full solidarity with Newsclick and those who are being hounded by the government of India.”

They are demanding the immediate release of Mr Purkayastha and Mr Chakraborty, an end to the harassment of alternative media, and for journalists and publications around the world to offer their full solidarity with Newsclick.

Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists, ranked India 161st in its press freedom rankings this year, writing that the situation in the country has deteriorated from “problematic” to “very bad.”