The latest report in the New York Times details India’s purchase of the secretive Pegasus cyber weapon during a trip by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel in 2017 as part of a Defence purchase deal.
The cyber weapon that allegedly allows the user of the technology to intrusively snoop on the targeted and closely track all their personal activity on their mobile device, has been used by the Indian government to spy on its own citizens including journalists, activists, members of the opposition parties and has also reportedly been used to plant fake evidence on dissidents to arrest them based on flimsy charges.
The NYT report, which in detail, has listed the nature of the deal between India and Israel is yet another puncture into the plea by the Modi government that has been avoiding any kind of scrutiny.
If one will recall, the US President Richard Nixon was forced to resign after it was exposed that he was using CIA to snoop on his own citizens including political rivals and other dissidents.
What Modi has been doing, if the allegation and the evidence-based reporting has suggested, constitutes acts that are far worse in nature than what Nixon had done.
Based on the reporting and the research done by Citizen Lab as well as their own research Facebook-owned Whatsapp and Apple have both sued the Israel-based NSO group for hacking into their users phones suggesting that the evidence that Whatsapp and Apple have is compelling enough to suggest that the allegations are true.
Similarly, investigations have been launched by several western governments into the use of Israeli-made cyber warfare to target the devices of unsuspecting citizens.
The need of the hour is for accountability and responsibility to be fixed on those within the echelons of power that have bought and used weapons of warfare on their own citizens.
The use of such warfare has no place in a democracy like India and while it has been known to be used by dictators and other autocratic governments, the least we as a collective can do to reclaim our democracy is to hold those in power -- no matter how high the persons responsible for this are placed.
Just as US president Richard Nixon was made to resign -- something that would be unheard of in any country that wasn’t a democracy -- if India seeks to continue to claim itself as a democracy -- nothing should be out of bounds for probing agencies.
For now we have a SC-appointed probe committee that is looking into the allegations of the probe even as a fresh petition has been filed.
The question that we are faced with is will India’s once robust democratic institutions live up to the job that they have been tasked with or will they crumble to protect the reputations and image of those currently occupying high office that they are meant to hold to account. One hopes that it is the former.
