By Suresh Unnithan
Kerala woke on 16 September 2026 to a familiar theatre: policemen at a news desk, phones on a table, live feed stuttering, and both sides already shouting “democracy.” The Special Investigation Team walked into Reporter TV’s Kalamassery headquarters with a magistrate’s warrant. The channel walked out of the morning with a press-freedom sermon. Between the two lies the real story—not only whether a search was lawful, but whether a business house that never grew out of a newsroom is now wrapping a tax-and-contract scandal in the national flag of Article 19(1)(a).
The owners of Reporter Broadcasting Company, the Augustine brothers, did not arrive in television through years of reporting or editing. They arrived as promoters. That does not make them guilty. It does make the sudden piety about “the Fourth Estate” look like a well-cut suit thrown over a ledger. Across India, a pattern has hardened: promoters float a channel, use the masthead as moral armour, and cry “attack on the press” the moment investigators knock on the accounts door. The police say they smell that smell here. The law, however, does not punish a smell. It demands a statute, a warrant, and a limit.
What the statute actually allows
The FIR registered on 15 September at Kalamassery police station names Anto Augustine as first accused and the company as second. The charges invoked are Sections 318(2) and 318(4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023—cheating, and cheating that dishonestly induces delivery of property—read with Section 61 BNS on criminal conspiracy (the successor to IPC Sections 420 and 120-B). Section 318(4) is cognizable and non-bailable; conspiracy under Section 61(2)(a) rides on the gravity of the object offence. That combination gives the police a lawful foothold to investigate.
The financial core is not decorative. An SIT GST inquiry quantified alleged evasion at ₹25.78 crore—₹22.68 crore of it IGST said to be unpaid under the reverse-charge mechanism on about ₹126 crore remitted to the Argentina Football Association, plus further foreign legal fees and disputed input-tax credit. The FIR alleges “illegal and fake” insertions in the AFA agreement and an attempt to secure the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium at Kaloor after exemption from a ₹5-crore security deposit. Those are allegations a magistrate may test. They are not yet convictions.
The warrant, and where it stops
Search power now sits in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Section 96 BNSS (the old CrPC Section 93) lets a court issue a search warrant when it believes a person will not produce a document or thing, or that a general search is necessary for the purposes of any inquiry or trial. Section 103 BNSS requires free ingress on production of the warrant and a list of things seized, signed by witnesses. Section 105 BNSS, a new safeguard, requires audio-video recording of search and seizure “as far as practicable.” ADGP P. Vijayan says the SIT videographed the operation. That recording is now the State’s best defence—or its most inconvenient exhibit.
A warrant, however, is not a roaming licence. It authorises recovery of material relevant to the FIR. It does not dissolve the distinction between a company’s accounts office and a functioning newsroom, or between corporate servers and the personal phones of reporters on shift.
The constitutional ceiling
Article 19(1)(a) has, since Express Newspapers (P) Ltd. v. Union of India, 1959 SCR 12, been read to include freedom of the press. That freedom is not a personal privilege of the promoter. It is the public’s right to receive news. Article 21, after K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, protects informational privacy. A mobile phone is not a filing cabinet; it is a warehouse of contacts, drafts and unpublished material.
The Supreme Court has not yet delivered a final code on device seizure, but in Ram Ramaswamy v. Union of India (W.P. (Crl.) 138/2021) and Foundation for Media Professionals v. Union of India (W.P. (Crl.) 395/2022) it has already said that uncontrolled seizure of journalists’ and academics’ devices is constitutionally intolerable, directed the Union to frame guidelines, and circulated interim principles: prior judicial warrant as the rule; no general sweep of every device on the premises; privileged and journalistic material to be isolated; copies, not indefinite custody. In the Pegasus matter the Court went further: protection of sources is “one of the basic conditions for the freedom of the press.” Wholesale collection of on-duty reporters’ phones—even if later returned—sits in the teeth of that line.
So: if officers entered an active news desk at dawn, filmed staff, and took devices of journalists who are not the accused, they stepped from a corporate search under Section 96 BNSS into interference with press function under Article 19(1)(a) and informational privacy under Article 21. That is encroachment—not because the company is sacred, but because the function of gathering news is.
Police and Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan deny disruption and seizure. The channel and Opposition Leader Pinarayi Vijayan insist phones of those on duty were taken and live operations stalled. Both cannot be wholly right. The public test is statutory and constitutional at once: produce the warrant’s schedule, the Section 105 recording, the Section 103 seizure list, and show that source contacts were not the unstated harvest.
None of this washes the promoters clean. A media licence is not a tax holiday. Foreign remittances of that size, stadium custody without a watertight government–AFA contract, and a channel owned by men with no prior journalistic lineage give investigators reason to ask whether the microphone was bought as insurance. The growing Indian habit—business first, channel later, “press freedom” last—deserves suspicion. Suspicion, however, is not a licence to occupy the desk.
The law allows the SIT to open the company’s books under Sections 318 and 61 BNS and Sections 96 and 105 BNSS. It does not allow the State to confuse the books with the bulletin. If the Augustines used a channel as a shield, the answer is evidence. If the police used a warrant as a warning to a noisy newsroom, the answer is the same. Kerala can have both a tax case and a free press. What it cannot afford is a government that cannot tell a ledger from a live camera—or a promoter who cannot tell a newsroom from a private vault.