The newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, said that tax inspectors visited its offices in the capital New Delhi and the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan in the early morning.
The paper shocked India with its reporting of dead bodies in the river Ganges during the brutal second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic this spring. It criticized authorities for under-reporting Covid-19 deaths and challenged state officials and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over their handling of the crisis.
“The government has clamped down on the group that represented an accurate picture of what happened to the country during the second wave of Covid-19,” the paper wrote in a report on the tax raid published Thursday on the homepage of its Hindi edition. The 63-year-old company also publishes newspapers in Gujarati and Marathi languages.
In its report, the paper added that tax officials also raided the homes of several Dainik Bhaskar employees, and seized the phones of those…