French journalist Sebastien Farcis, who has served as a South Asia correspondent in India for the past 13 years, claimed on Thursday that he was
compelled to leave the country following the Union home ministry’s denial to extend his work permit.

Farcis is the second French journalist to have allegedly been denied a work permit by India in the past four months.

In a statement posted on X, Farcis called it an “incomprehensible censorship”.

“On 17th June, I was forced to leave India, a country where I had lived and worked as a journalist for 13 years, as a South Asia correspondent for Radio France Internationale, Radio France, Libération and the Swiss and Belgian public radios,” Farcis said in the statement.

According to him, the ministry refused to renew his journalist permit on March 7 and informed him about the rejection of permission to cover the Lok Sabha elections. He said no reason was cited to justify the work ban despite formal and repeated requests made to the ministry.

Sources in the ministry refused to comment on Farcis’s allegations.

“This work ban comes as a big shock: it was communicated to me on the eve of the Indian general elections, the largest democratic elections in the world, which I was hence forbidden to cover. This appeared to me as incomprehensible censorship,” he said.

“This denial comes in a worrying context of increasing restrictions on the work of foreign journalists: after Vanessa Dougnac I am the second French journalist in four months having to leave India under these conditions. At least five OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) foreign correspondents have been banned from working as journalists in less than two years,” Farcis added.

Farcis is now in France awaiting the Indian government’s decision on his application for a new work permit. He is an OCI card holder married to an Indian.

In February, Dougnac, who is married to an Indian and had been living in India for the past 22 years, left the country after she received a notice from the Indian government regarding the cancellation of her OCI card.

The ministry had accused her of spreading “negative perceptions about India” through her “malicious reporting”.