On October 3, 2023, the day after MK Gandhi’s birthday, over five hundred officers of the Delhi Police fanned out across India to detain either at their Special Cell station or at their homes over a hundred journalists and researchers. They held them for interrogation for the entire day – an average of eight hours per person – and asked them if they had covered the epochal farmers’ revolt of 2020-21, the anti-Muslim violence in East Delhi in February 2020, and the disastrous government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.