Iran’s conservative judicial authorities indicted the managing editor of a prominent daily newspaper on Tuesday, saying that he had violated prohibitions on the coverage of Mohammad Khatami, a reformist-minded former president they now describe as a seditionist.

Rights activists said the indictment was a sign not only of the escalating repression of the news media in Iran, but also of heightening tensions between hard-line factions and the administration of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, with parliamentary elections due in February.

“It is absurd that Khatami, president for eight years, has been declared essentially nonexistent to such an extent that disseminating his picture and voice is considered a crime,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York.

The indictment was also notable because the editor, Mahmoud Doaei, of the Ettelaat, one of Iran’s oldest newspapers, was an early figure in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was a member of the inner circle around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founding father, and was considered somewhat protected in the factional feuding that has increasingly marked Iran’s opaque political hierarchy.