Mamata Banerjee has set up a panel to probe into the Pegasus phone-hacking scandal. This moves comes days after her nephew and Trinamool MP, Abhishek Banerjee, appeared on a list of potential surveillance targets.
The Pegasus scandal panel consists of retired Calcutta High Court Chief Justice Jyotirmay Bhattacharya, and Justice MB Lokur, a former Supreme Court judge.
This move is significant for one more reason; it is the first formal inquiry into allegations that between 2017 and 2019 an Indian client of Israel’s NSO Group used Pegasus to hack hundreds of phones, including journalists, government officials, opposition leaders, and even a constitutional authority.
“We thought the centre would form an inquiry commission, or a court-monitored probe would be ordered to look into this phone-hacking incident. But the centre is sitting idle… so we decided to form a ‘commission on inquiry” to look into the matter,” Ms Banerjee said in a pointed swipe.
“… I hope this small step will wake up others. We want it to start as soon as possible. Many people from Bengal have been tapped,” she added.
Last week, Bengal Chief minister Banerjee, who is now travelling to Delhi to unite the opposition against the Bhartiya Janta party ahead of the 2024 polls, spoke of a “surveillance state” and said it was a “threat” to democracy.
“Three things make democracy – media, judiciary and the Election Commission – and Pegasus has captured all three,” she said in a speech shared with several senior opposition leaders.
Quoting the Israeli spyware as “dangerous” and “ferocious”, Mamata said that she could not even talk to other opposition leaders, because she feared her phone had been tapped too.
“Mr Modi, don’t mind. I am not attacking you personally. But you, and may be the Home Minister, you are deploying agencies against opposition leaders,” she said ferociously.
In a second round of reports on potential Pegasus targets, on July 19, The Wire which is a part of an international media consortium investigating this issue, said that Congress leader MP Rahul Gandhi, Abhishek Banerjee, and poll strategist Prashant Kishor were on the list.
Bengal’s Trinamool came down heavily on the BJP at the centre, proclaiming this proved they were afraid of Mr Banerjee and that the party was suffering from “fear-psychosis” after its defeat in Bengal.
Mr Banerjee hitting back with a taunting tweeted calling for two minutes’ silence for “sore losers”.
The opposition’s accusations said that the NSO Group sells Pegasus only to “vetted governments,” which triggered outrage and has demanded for a joint parliamentary committee probe.
The centre, however, has rejected calls for a inquiry of any sort, insisting that the surveillance of the alleged kind was impossible given existing checks and balances within the country’s legal framework.
IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw – who was also on the list of potential targets before he joined the BJP told that the parliament attempts were being made to malign Indian democracy.
Pegasus spyware works by penetrating phones via ‘zero-click’ attacks, which does not require interaction from the phone’s owner, on or Apple’s iMessage or WhatsApp, which is the world’s most widely-used instant messaging service, with 400 million users in India alone.
