New Delhi: The ousted president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia (FCC) on 8 October sent a show cause notice to the interim president Simran Sodhi and the interim general secretary Sanjay Kumar asking them to explain within seven days why they should not be “expelled from the FCC for your anti-club activities”.
The development marks the latest in a tussle for the club’s leadership that began last week with each side making conflicting claims.
In the notice, seen by ThePrint, veteran journalist S. Venkat Narayan said that at an emergency meeting on 7 October held at the FCC, the governing committee made a serious view of the duo making “false allegations” against the office bearers and proclaiming themselves as the interim president and interim general secretary.
It was not immediately clear who attended this meeting.
“It is preposterous that you should arrogate to yourself the authority to call a GC meeting, make baseless and ridiculous charges against the Office Bearers elected at the AGM in 2023 for a two-year term. Your meeting is illegal, and your allegations are ridiculous and false,” Narayan wrote in the letter.
The issue came to light on 4 October when eight members of the FCC unanimously passed a no-confidence vote ousting Narayan as the president, along with vice president Waiel Awwad, a senior international independent journalist from Syria, and general secretary Prakash Nanda. Foreign affairs analyst Sodhi was chosen as the interim president and Arab News’s India correspondent Kumar as the interim general secretary.
Kumar alleged to ThePrint that the “highhandedness” of Narayan and senior EurAsian Times journalist Nanda and the lack of transparency in running the club led to the “no-confidence motion by the majority of the managing committee members”.
But the final straw, he alleged, was the managing committee being kept in the dark on the organisation of the International Association of Press Clubs (IAPC).
The FCC is a group of more than 500 journalists and photojournalists covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Afghanistan, and Tibet. Its managing committee comprises 11 members, including the president, vice president, and general secretary. However, a core member of the FCC had told ThePrint, when this issue first erupted, that among the eight remaining members, while four are elected members with voting rights, the others are co-opted as committee members with no voting rights.
Also Read: High drama at Delhi’s FCC ahead of big convention. Club president, V-P ‘voted out in emergency meet’
‘Allegations of funds misuse totally false’
In the letter to Sodhi and Kumar, Narayan said Nanda had informed in the annual general meeting (AGM) that it was the FCC’s turn to host the annual convention and that the expenditure would not exceed Rs 3,00,000. “And the AGM had approved the expenditure.”
Narayan further highlighted that because of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the upcoming US presidential elections on 5 November, many delegates covering those events had not confirmed their participation. “We have yet to receive a complete list of delegates. And not a single paisa has been spent on this score so far. Your claim that you were not informed is totally false,” he said in the letter.
The FCC is a member of the IAPC—a collaboration of over 40 small clubs across more than 35 countries. Every year, an IAPC convention is held in one of these countries.
Last year, it was held in London and, this time, it is going to be held in India in November. India last held the annual event ten years ago.
Moreover, he said, Sodhi’s letter to the IAPC headquarters and several of its member press clubs claiming that the funds were misused was “highly objectionable”.
“You have thus damaged the reputation of the FCC, its duly elected senior office bearers, and the country,” he alleged.
Narayan, in the letter, said that if they do not respond within seven days, “prompt action will be taken against both of you” to “undo the damage you have caused”.
While speaking to ThePrint, Narayan also accused Kumar and Sodhi of hacking the official website of the FCC. The details of the hacking were not immediately clear.
“The website was restored an hour ago and their game is up,” he told ThePrint through email.
‘Managing committee kept in the dark’
Responding to Narayan’s allegation about the website, Kumar called it a “blame game and character assassination”. He further alleged that it is because of such acts that most expat journalists working from India have revoked their memberships en masse from the FCC.
“The two failed in their duty to take up the welfare and wellbeing of the foreign journalists with the government. On the contrary, the two have sided with people such as Pankaj Yadav, who faces a litany of charges and was suspended as an accredited journalist by the Press Information Bureau,” Kumar said.
He added that Nanda and Narayan had been trying to reinstate Yadav as a member.
Kumar termed the incident a culmination of incidents that took place in the club over the past year-and-a-half. He claimed that Nanda and Narayan had started making decisions without taking the club into confidence. “FCC failed to stand by foreign journalists when they were expelled or asked to go by the government,” he told ThePrint.
Moreover, he alleged, that there was a lack of transparency in conducting the club’s day-to-day activities, with the final straw being the lack of transparency over the convention.
“We in the MC (managing committee) were kept in the dark about its date, about the members of the steering committee, expenses involved. Our approach was not confrontational but the response from both the ex-president and ex-general secretary prove our charges and concerns as expressed on 4 October,” he said.
The majority of committee members who joined hands in issuing no confidence were motivated by a desire to “restore the dignity of the club and bring back journalists from the foreign media”, said Kumar, adding that the aim was to make FCC a truly “representative journalist club”.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)