@Evening: 🗞️ Tax Ops At BBC Offices In Delhi, Mumbai — Let's Break It Down

↗️ There's another way on the BBC matter

India is not handling the misinformation challenges it's facing from Western news organisations, like the BBC, sensibly, R Jagannathan writes.

Context: The Income Tax Department on Tuesday conducted a survey operation at the BBC's offices in Delhi and Mumbai.

• The purpose was to ascertain possible violation by the British broadcaster of transfer pricing rules and profit diversions.

• The BBC has apparently been under the radar of Indian tax authorities for alleged non-compliance for an extended period, which has led to several notices being issued to the broadcaster.

• But the BBC is said to have "remained defiant."

• The tax survey comes just weeks after the UK's national broadcaster aired a two-part documentary series attacking PM Narendra Modi's tenure as chief minister during the Gujarat riots of 2002.

Wisdom of the approach. In the process of investigating possible tax evasion, India has only invested the BBC with more credibility than it deserves.

• The only way to undercut the BBC is to understand where it is coming from, and steadily undermine its claims to objectivity.

• The BBC derives its constitutional legitimacy from a royal charter it received from King George V, starting from 1 January 1927.

• The royal charter grants the BBC “independence”, but not freedom from bias.

• So, it doesn't make sense to attack its independence, because that's not the same thing as neutrality, freedom from bias, or even fairness.

• It merely means that the producers of its programmes are free to do their own stories, which includes pandering to their own biases.

The real question is: Where does the BBC get its anti-India bias from?

• We can even ask whether its bias is essentially anti-Hindu, since it would seldom consider covering the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Jammu and Kashmir.

• Not to forget, the BBC has a licence to splurge.

• Thanks to the huge funding it receives from taxpayers, not through the budget, but from a licence fee, it's able to indulge its own biases.

Earn your viewership. There's now a popular movement to defund the BBC.

• The Indian diaspora must be encouraged to join this movement unless the BBC gets out of bed with its chosen ideological partners — the left-liberals and Islamists of various hues.

• Unless the BBC is forced to seek audiences from those it can now choose to treat with disdain, it will not even try to reduce its bias.

Bottom line: The market is the best way to break the ideological lenses the BBC chooses to wear.