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New Delhi: Six years after the Delhi police opened an investigation into alleged financial fraud against Newsclick and its editor Prabir Purkayastha, the Delhi high court last month held the case untenable, saying that allowing the investigations to proceed would amount to a “gross abuse of the process of law”.

The case stemmed from an FIR registered by the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing in August 2020. Within days, the ED opened its own money-laundering investigation based on the FIR, alleging malpractice in funds received by Newsclick from abroad. In 2021, the agency conducted raids on Purkayastha’s home and the news portal’s office, alleging violations of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

On May 29 this year, Delhi high court Justice Neena Bansal Krishna quashed both the police FIR and the ED’s case. The judgement was made publicly available on June 10. Read more about the case here.

In an email interview, Purkayastha spoke to The Wire about his time in prison, his goals, the challenges facing young journalists and more. Edited excerpts follow.

You were imprisoned during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency as well as under what some commentators have described as an ‘undeclared Emergency’. Can you talk about both the instances, the similarities and the differences?

Let us start with the dissimilarities. At that time, we did not know........

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