Early Warning

The ominous CBI raids on the promoters of NDTV

- Anant Nath

The Central Bureau of Investigation’s raids on 5 June on the residences and offices of Radhika and Prannoy Roy, the founders and promoters of NDTV, are troubling on many counts. For one, there are the technical flaws in the CBI’s justification for its actions. According to the agency, it was responding to a complaint regarding an alleged loss to ICICI Bank on the repayment of an old loan to the Roys. NDTV’s many regulatory and financial travails have been well documented, including in an extensive report published in this magazine in December 2015, but the foundation of the CBI complaint in this instance is conspicuously weak. The news channel swiftly published a letter from ICICI Bank, dated from 2009, which stated that the loan had been repaid in full. Even if the bank suffered a loss, as the CBI insists it did, there are questions as to why the country’s premier investigative agency should probe a credit issue between two private parties, that too with the heavy-handedness shown in this case, especially when the relevant complaint did not come from the allegedly wronged party.