WHY THIS DONE BY B.J.P ?

A senior journalist believed to be working on an investigative story against the Chhattisgarh government was arrested around 3 am on Friday from his home near Delhi on charges of extortion. Vinod Verma, who is a member of the Editors Guild of India, was picked up from his Ghaziabad home by a police team that caught the last flight out of Raipur.

The police claim they have seized hundreds of CDs, a laptop and a pen drive from his home.

Mr Verma, a freelance journalist, has been Digital Editor at Amar Ujala and has worked with the BBC Hindi service in the past. He was part of a fact-finding team of the Editors Guild that travelled to Chhattisgarh last year to examine cases of intimidation of journalists.

Sources say the police, investigating a complaint of blackmail over a sex CD allegedly featuring a Chhattisgarh minister, raided a shop in Delhi that had made 1,000 copies. The shop owner allegedly named Mr Verma as the man who had commissioned the copies.

The blackmail complaint had been filed by Prakash Bajaj, a Chhattisgarh BJP leader.

The Chhattisgarh government claims Mr Verma was working with the state's opposition Congress to discredit the ruling BJP. The journalist, it says, is related to state Congress chief Bhupesh Vaghel. Mr Vaghel has denied it.

"This is an attack on democracy and we condemn this. They are targeting a journalist to protect their minister,"Mr Vaghel said.
The pre-dawn arrest has triggered outrage, with a deluge of posts on social media. The Congress' Pramod Tiwari tweeted that the arrest was a clear message that "If you speak against the BJP you will be crushed."