NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police has mentioned the name of constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia as a "key person" in the FIR against arrested NewsClick editor Prabir Purkayastha, stating his defence in the legal cases for Chinese Telecom majors Xiaomi and Vivo. The First Information Report (FIR) of the cops said, Purkayastha along with "Neville Roy Singham, Geeta Hariharan, Gautam Bhatia (key person) conspired to create a 'Legal Community Network' in India to campaign for and put up a spirited defence of legal cases against aforementioned Chinese telecom companies in return for benefits by these companies." There is no other mention of the legal scholar anywhere in the FIR. Reacting to the naming of Bhatia, taking to his X (Twitter) handle, Trinamool Congress MP Saket Gokhale said, "It is UNPRECEDENTED that a lawyer can be named in an FIR for providing legal defence to a client. Every entity is entitled to a legal defence & lawyers cannot be charged no matter what the accusations against their client company are. Delhi Police has clearly filed a frivolous FIR against NewsClick which has no merits and has purely been done out of the vendetta of Modi & Shah. Invoking terror charges has only been done to ensure that the journalists stay in jail as long as possible before they get acquitted because the process is the punishment." As per the reports, Singham is a resident of Shanghai, and an active member of the propaganda department of the Communist Party of China and writer Geeta Hariharan, as per cops, is a shareholder of the NewsClick media.
ALSO READ | NewsClick rejects allegations levelled in FIR against it as untenable, bogus
The FIR also alleged that big Chinese telecom companies like Xiaomi and Vivo incorporated thousands of shell firms in India in violation of PMLA/FEMA for illegally infusing foreign funds. "....large amount of funds were routed from China in the circuitous and camouflaged manner and paid news were intentionally peddled criticising domestic policies, development projects of India and promoting, projecting and defending policies and programmes of the Chinese government," an excerpt of the FIR read.
The police, in the FIR, also alleged that Purkayastha, Singham and others actively propagated false narratives to discredit the efforts of the Indian government to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. "Moreover, they have acted against the national interest by promoting a misleading and false narrative about the domestic pharmaceutical industry and the policies and development initiatives of the democratically elected Indian government in cohort with anti-national forces,” the FIR stated.
