Pegasus spyware issue: Rahul Gandhi, Ashwini Vaishnaw potential targets; Prashant Kishor's phone hacked

Prashant Kishor, Ashwini Vaishnaw and Rahul Gandhi. File Pic

At least two mobile phone accounts used by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and the phone numbers of newly-inducted Communications, Electronics and Information Technology, and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, were among 300 verified Indian numbers listed as potential targets by an official Indian client of the Israeli surveillance technology vendor, NSO Group, The Wire reported.

The phone of poll strategist Prashant Kishor was also broken into using the Pegasus spyware.

Last week, it was Vaishnaw's ministry which issued a formal response to the Pegasus Project media consortium denying that any of the individuals mentioned to the PMO in advance had been spied upon.

Vaishnaw was informed of his presence in the leaked database on Sunday but has yet to respond with a comment or reaction.

In the absence of forensics on the phones associated with the numbers on the leaked database, it is not possible to conclusively establish whether Pegasus was successfully deployed against Vaishnaw or Patel, The Wire said.

Also Read: Pegasus spyware issue: Numbers of over 40 Indian journalists on leaked list of potential surveillance targets

Such was the apparent interest in Gandhi that the numbers of five of his social friends and acquaintances were also placed on the list of potential targets. None of the five plays any role in politics or public affairs, the report said.

Gandhi's numbers, which he has since given up, are part of a large database of leaked numbers believed to be drawn up by NSO Group clients and accessed by the French media non-profit Forbidden Stories and shared with 16 news organisations, including The Wire, The Guardian, Washington Post, Le Monde, and Haaretz.

Gandhi's phones are not among those examined as he no longer has the handsets he used at the time that his numbers appear to have been selected for targeting - from mid-2018 to mid-2019.

In the absence of forensics, it is not possible to conclusively establish whether Pegasus was deployed against Gandhi. At the same time, the presence of at least nine numbers linked to his circle - one of the larger clusters around a person of interest that the Pegasus Project has detected - suggests that his presence in the leaked database is not happenstance, The Wire said.

Gandhi told The Wire that he had received suspicious WhatsApp messages in the past - one of the known vectors for a spyware hack - and frequently changed numbers and instruments so as to make it "a little harder for them" to target him.

Apart from Gandhi's personal phones, the numbers of two close aides, Alankar Sawai and Sachin Rao, also figure in the leaked database, for mid-2019.

Rao is a member of the Congress Working Committee whose current role involves training party cadre while Sawai is attached to Gandhi's office and typically spends most of his working day with him. Sawai's phone was stolen in 2019 and thus unavailable for forensic examination, while Rao said his phone from that period got "fried" and no longer switches on, the report said.

In addition, the mobile number of key strategist Abhishek Banerjee, the powerful Trinamool Congress MLA who is also the nephew of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, was also selected as a potential target for surveillance by a government client of NSO Group, an investigation of leaked data by The Wire and its media partners on the Pegasus Project has shown.

Also on the list is Banerjee's personal secretary.

Their phones, along with that of a close aide to Kishor, were not immediately available for forensic investigation, making it impossible to say definitively whether an attempt to hack them was made.

Since NSO insists that only "vetted governments" can purchase Pegasus, the targetting of Kishor -- who was working as an advisor to Mamata Banerjee -- is the first iron-clad piece of evidence that this deadly spyware is being used in India by an as yet unidentified agency to gather political information from rivals of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, The Wire said.

Kishor's current or one-time role as a key political advisor and strategist for a range of opposition parties, including the DMK in Tamil Nadu and the Congress in Punjab, besides the Trinamool, means the agency targeting him is also interested in gathering information about the government's political opponents in different parts of the country.

The forensic examination of his current phone also shows that what appear to be unsuccessful attempts to initiate a Pegasus attack were made on Kishor's phone in 2018, just months prior to the general elections of 2019. This was at a time when there was considerable speculation over who Kishor and his much-in-demand election consultancy organisation, I-Pac, would be assisting in the elections.

Traces of Pegasus on Kishor's phone were also detected in 14 days in June 2021 and 12 days in July 2021, including July 13, the day when he met Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi in Delhi. In fact, a hack of Kishor's phone occurred even on the date that The Wire met him and AI helped conduct forensic analysis on it.

The numbers of Minister of State for Jal Shakti Prahlad Singh Patel were also among the list of potential targets.

Also on the list is the personal secretary to BJP leader Vasundhara Raje, when she was Chief Minister in Rajasthan, and Sanjay Kachroo, who worked as an officer on special duty (OSD) for Smriti Irani in her first years as a Union minister in the Modi government from 2014-2015.

Other junior politicians linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's leader, Pravin Togadia, a long-time opponent of Modi from his days as Chief Minister of Gujarat, are other individuals whose numbers figure in the database.

Patel, the MP from Madhya Pradesh's Damoh, was recently shifted to the Jal Shakti ministry under Cabinet Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat from the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, where he held independent charge, The Wire said.

The former Odisha-cadre Indian Administrative Service officer and Rajya Sabha MP Vaishnaw, on the other hand, was given three crucial cabinet portfolios in what was a much-publicised appointment in the latest cabinet reshuffle. He appears to have been targeted for possible surveillance back in 2017, when he had not yet taken the plunge in favour of the BJP. Another number, apparently listed in the name of his wife, also appears to have been selected, the report said.

Apart from the two Union ministers, the phone numbers of Kachroo, his father and his minor son also appear in the leaked data. A corporate executive, Kachroo was chosen by then Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani as her officer on special duty (OSD) in 2014 but he never got formally appointed.

Their phone numbers continue to appear in the leaked records for a sizeable part of 2018.

Kachroo's interim appointment as an OSD in Irani's ministry was examined by the PMO, after his controversial role in appointments came to the fore on social media. His appointment, unlike OSDs of other ministries, had reportedly not been approved by the Appointment Committee of the Cabinet (ACC), The Wire said.

BJP sources had then told the media that one of the reasons Irani was shifted to the supposedly lightweight Textiles Ministry in 2016 was her impulse to unilaterally take decisions without consultation, the report said.

Kachroo's appointment had also rubbed the RSS the wrong way, claimed some sources who thought "power brokers" were being preferred over dedicated Sangh workers. Kachroo, however, is still considered an integral part of Irani's coterie.

The Wire said a range of phone numbers belonging to people who are associated with the Sangh parivar appear in the records. These include Togadia, whose phone number was potentially targeted for surveillance throughout 2018.

Vasundhara Raje's personal secretary Pradeep Awasthi's phone number was also marked as a possible candidate for surveillance for most part of early 2018, months ahead of the state assembly polls in December 2018. It is widely known that Raje and BJP's central leadership have often been at odds. In the run-up to the Assembly polls, her tiff with the central leadership had become apparent, The Wire said.

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