Last year, the Andhra Pradesh Assembly passed a resolution to set up a committee to find out if the previous Telugu Desam Party (TDP) government had bought and used the controversial Israeli spyware, Pegasus. The issue has not died down yet as the investigation is incomplete.
In March 2022, the YSR Congress Party claimed that the government headed by N. Chandrababu Naidu had gained unauthorised access to public data for use for election purposes and had also tapped phones, including of some Opposition leaders. What started off as a whisper in the YSRCP soon blew up into a major political storm and hit the TDP hard.
The Andhra Pradesh Assembly passed a resolution to constitute a seven-member House Committee to probe the “unlawful interception of communications, data theft and illegal transmission causing infringement of citizens’ rights” during 2016-19.
The House Committee held meetings with senior officials of the Home and Information Technology Departments and gathered information on methods through which the spyware was procured and used for keeping some individuals, including Opposition leaders, under surveillance. The House Committee led by Tirupati MLA Bhumana Karunakar Reddy submitted its interim report in September 2022. It said that there had been unauthorised transmission of public data which had been acquired through surreptitious means. But it also added that the gravity of the offence warranted a deeper investigation. Accordingly, on March 15, 2023, Legislative Assembly Speaker Thammineni Seetharam announced that the committee would be given another six months to submit its final report.
But just over a month before the committee was given more time to dig deeper into the issue there were new allegations of phone tapping, this time from the YSRCP’s own MLAs — Kotamreddy Sridhar Reddy and Anam Ramanarayana Reddy. The issue then gained more attention when West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that unlike the TDP government, she had spurned an offer for ₹25 crore to buy Pegasus when a delegation of the Israeli company met her. TDP leader Nara Lokesh refuted the allegations that the government purchased the spyware.
While the reasons for the complaints of the two MLAs could be political, their statements cannot be overlooked since they pertain to the privacy of individuals, which the Supreme Court declared is a fundamental right and an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.
Mr. Sridhar Reddy wrote a letter to Home Minister Amit Shah requesting an inquiry into the incident and is awaiting a response. Mr. Ramanarayana Reddy, who was among the few close confidantes of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, said his phones were tapped and his security was reduced, apparently because he raised a banner of revolt.
The two MLAs might perceive this to be part of a political vendetta unleashed by their own party, but the issue flagged by them, as also the one that cast serious doubts on what the TDP government had allegedly done in collusion with some private companies, merits a speedy and thorough investigation. If anyone is guilty of these charges, punishment must be meted out and a foolproof mechanism for protecting individual privacy and data must be evolved. The allegations of surveillance on politicians cannot be ignored either. This is a sensitive issue which harks back to the sensational cash-for-vote scam in Telangana in 2015. Then, phones of the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu had been reportedly tapped.
It is pertinent to note that only the agencies of the Central and the State governments have the right to get phones tapped in compliance with stringent norms laid down under the Indian Telegraph Act, and that too in exceptional circumstances.
The findings of the House Committee are eagerly awaited. Whether the YSRCP MLAs’ complaints will be taken seriously or discarded as lacking substance and being politically motivated remains to be seen. The facts in such high-profile cases are rarely allowed to come out. One can only hope that these allegations about two rival parties indulging in such wrongdoing are probed, that the outcome will be different this time, and that the laws of the land are upheld.
#political #storm #privacy
