JOURNALIST FROM FRANCE CLAIMS HE WAS ‘FORCED TO LEAVE INDIA’

French journalist Sébastien Farcis on Thursday claimed that he was “forced to leave” India and forbidden from covering the 2024 general elections after the Union ministry of home affairs refused to renew his permit, the second such claim in four months by a journalist from France.

HT could not independently verify his claims, made on social media platform X.

“On 17th June, I was forced to leave India, a country where I had lived and worked as a journalist for 13 years, as a South Asia correspondent for Radio France Internationale, Radio France, Libération and the Swiss and Belgian public radios,” Farcis said in a post on X on Thursday.

He claimed that on March 7, the MHA refused to renew his journalist permit and informed him about the rejection to cover the general elections.

“This appeared to me as an incomprehensible censorship,” he wrote, stating that he had been working in India as a journalist since 2011 and had obtained all the necessary visas and accreditations.

“I have…never worked in restricted or protected areas without a permit. On several occasions, the MHA even granted me permits to report from border areas,” he wrote.

MHA did not issue any statement on the matter. No comment was made by Fracis’s current or former employers.

In February, Vanessa Dougnac, the former South Asia correspondent for newsweekly Le Point and the newspapers Le Soir and La Croix, said she was forced to leave the country after a notice by the Union home ministry asking why her OCI card shouldn’t be cancelled as her work created a “biased negative perception” of India.