Journalist Sebastian Farcis, once part of a hate campaign against The Kashmir Files, refused renewal of journalism permit in India

NEW DELHI: Journalist Sebastian Farcis of the Radio Internationale has penned an open letter stating that he's been forced to leave India, his claimed 'second homeland', after the Ministry of Home Affairs refused to renew his journalism permit which expired 3 months back.      

He says that he, alongwith his family who were also based in India, have been "uprooted overnight" due to this "incomprehensible censorship". 

Even as Farcis opens up about his "shock" on being "forbidden to cover" the world's largest democratic elections - India's Lok Sabha Elections 2024 - we went back 2 years in time and found out that in 2022, Farcis was one of the journalists of the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC) of Delhi responsible for cancelling of director Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri's press conference on his movies, The Kashmir Files, as per a report in OpIndia.

In May 2022, Farcis, alongwith a few other governing board members of the FCC had threatened then-FCC President Munish Gupta to resign from the Board if Agnihotri was allowed to go ahead with his press conference on 'The Kashmir Files' - a movie which covered the 1990 mass genocide and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley.         

Farcis was joined by Emily Schmall then-India Correspondent for the New York Times, Tawqeer Hussain then-Correspondent of Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative Japanese newspaper and Kumkum Chadha then Correspondent of Independent Television from Bangladesh, according Pankaj Yadav, a former member of FCC's governing board.

Yadav had posted about the same on his official 'X' (then Twitter) profile, @pkscribe.

After FCC, the Press Club of India too had refused to allow their press conference.

Agnihotri's team was finally forced to host an independent press conference for journalists at Hotel Le Meridian.

Talking about the boycotts from various quarters, Agnihotri had posted on his official 'X' (then Twitter) handle, saying, "Foreign Correspondents Club, New Delhi has cancelled my PC on 5th May in an undemocratic manner as part of a hate-campaign against The Kashmir Files."