VEILED THREATS TO PROMINENT JOURNALIST

Senior journalist Barkha Dutt on Thursday went public on Twitter, on getting "chilling" threats from powerful people in the establishment, indicating that she and her family were under surveillance.

She posted a series of six explosive tweets that she had received containing the veiled threats and the "messages."

After posting the tweets, she told news portal News Central that "If anything happens to me and my family, whether in terms of a smear campaign or any other threat, then the government and the BJP will be responsible." Dutt also put the interview on her Twitter handle.

Dutt is presently a Contributing Columnist for The Washington Post and Contributing Editor for The Week, according to her Twitter bio. Familiar to many Indians from years as a sen- ior editor and anchor on NDTV, she added that she was told that a big meeting had been held on how to stall her and her projects.

Dutt asserted in the interview that she had not spoken so far because she did not want to become the story. She decided to go public because she was con- veyed a message through a friend to abandon the projects she is working on. She claimed that senior BJP leaders have personally told her "aap ye mat kariye ham ye hone nahin denge" [Don’t do this (continue work), we will not let this happen.]

When asked if she ever been intimidated in this manner before, Dutt said, "Every government tries to control information. However, the last one and a half year have been unprecedentedly horrible for me. Reports that I am under surveillance are disturbing. If they are true, the government needs to explain."