PROTESTS continued across India today at the crackdown on journalists that saw an editor and a manager at the Newsclick website arrested on Tuesday.

In Kolkata demonstrators burned an effigy of Home Minister Amit Shah while journalists’ unions, press clubs and free speech organisations sent a letter to Chief Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud warning that “a large section of journalists in India finds itself working under threat of reprisal.”

The letter, signed among others by the Press Club of India, New Delhi, the Indian Women’s Press Corps and the National Alliance of Journalists, said that “just as the police are obliged by the constitution to state grounds of arrest, it must equally be a precondition to questioning.” 

It expresses alarm at the way journalists interrogated at length earlier this week were questioned about their coverage of the farmers’ protests of 2020-21, the government’s handling of the pandemic and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, by which the state is accused of depriving large numbers of Indians of their citizenship in Assam. Police asking these questions had given no reasons bar “vague assertions about the investigation of some unspecified offence,” it notes.

“Subjecting journalists to a concentrated criminal process because the government disapproves of their coverage of national and international affairs is an attempt to chill the press,” it warns.

Newsclick editor Prabir Purkayastha and human resources chief Amit Chakravarty are being held, having been arrested on Tuesday for alleged breaches of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which is supposed to deal with terrorism offences.