New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has today, Thursday, April 13, filed a case against BBC India in connection with alleged “foreign exchange violations”.Officials have told the news agency PTI that ED has asked for documents and the recording of statements by certain BBC employees under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA)This comes after the BBC office in Delhi was ‘surveyed’ by the Income Tax Department in February in a controversial move that made global headlines. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) had said that the profits shown by various entities of the BBC group allegedly did not match with their scale of operations in India. Further, they said that taxes had not been paid on certain remittances. The ‘survey’ done with personnel of para-military staff outside the premises of the BBC was criticised and seen as linked with recent work by the BBC, especially a documentary on the Gujarat violence of 2002 which also featured clips of the then-chief minister, and now prime minister, Narendra Modi. The union government had taken the extraordinary step of invoking emergency powers to ban the documentary in India.Just two days after the UK government defended the BBC after the Indian income tax (I-T) department officials ‘surveyed’ the British public broadcaster’s Delhi and Mumbai offices, its director-general Tim Davie said in an email to staff in India that the BBC will not be put off from reporting without fear or favour. Davie thanked staff for their courage and said nothing was more important than reporting impartially, according to the BBC.The BBC, had also said that it is cooperating with the investigation.ED taking up the matter raises the stakes as the central agency has been in the eye of a storm with the opposition saying that central agencies are being used to serve political ends in various ways.The Wire has a two-part series on questions raised by the ED’s actions and its alleged deployment for political ends. ED has denied all charges and told The Wire that “The tenor and content of your letter shows that it is based not only on incorrect and misleading facts but also shows that you have not conducted proper research including checking the website of the ED. Otherwise, you have not put certain questions relating to statistics and asked for answers from us. It is clear that the purpose of this letter is to do a roving inquiry for an oblique purpose.”