On Thursday morning, Income Tax Department raided several offices of the Dainik Bhaskar group across the country on allegations of tax evasion. Sources are ongoing in its offices located in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, NDTV reported.
The newspaper group has stood out with its grassroots coverage of the pandemic and reports critical of the BJP governments’ mishandling of the COVID19 pandemic, earning praises at home and abroad.
Dainik Bhaskar Group is one of the largest newspaper groups publishing in four languages including Hindi and Gujarati.
Recently two of its newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar and Divya Bhaskar published in Hindi and Gujarati respectively brought global attention to the massive death toll and the government hiding number of deaths during the murderous second wave of the pandemic.
Earlier in mid-May when the BJP ruled Union government and various BJP ruled state governments continued their denial in the face of a national tragedy where lakhs of people died because of COVID19 and lack of medical care, Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar had reported from 27 districts in Uttar Pradesh that more than two thousand dead bodies have been found along the river Ganga, some floating in it and some lying on its banks. These bodies, according to the report were of people who died of COVID19.
Dainik Bhaskar Groups newspapers across the country, all through the second wave of COVID19 covered the ways in which the state was either failing to act or acting to hide its failure. Divya Bhaskar, group’s Gujarati daily had reported widely when the CR Patil, BJP state president, had claimed that he would be giving away 5,000 remdesivir injections to patients for free, not as a government initiative to help but in his individual capacity.
The group had also aggressively questioned the BJP ruled MP government about its abysmally low reported COVID19 deaths when the crematoriums across it were full of funeral pyres and dead bodies.
Also read: Body count in thousands along the River Ganga in Eastern UP amid the Second Wave of COVID19
This is a developing story.
