‘Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Rahul Gandhi were potential targets’

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and the newly inducted IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw were potential targets for snooping, The Wire reported on Monday. The news portal was part of the global media consortium that investigated the alleged hacking of 300 personalities in India through Israeli spyware Pegasus sold only to the government. The spyware was used to target journalists, activists and political leaders. Opposition parties on Monday demanded an independent judicial or parliamentary committee probe.

Nearly 300 verified mobile phone numbers, including of two serving ministers, 40 journalists, three Opposition leaders and one sitting Supreme Court judge, besides scores of business persons and activists in India, were on the list of potential targets for surveillance by an unidentified Indian agency, reported The Wire.

Ashwini Vaishnaw was recently inducted into the Union Cabinet. File pic/PTI

A day after releasing the list of journalists on target list, the news portal released the names of politicians whose phones were allegedly the target of the spyware. Besides Rahul Gandhi and Vaishnaw, the list reportedly named Minister of State for Jal Shakti Prahlad Singh Patel and TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee, nephew of West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee. Political strategist Prashant Kishor's phone was hacked, confirmed the probe, reported The Wire.

The personal secretary to Vasundhara Raje Scindia during her term as Rajasthan chief minister, Sanjay Kachroo who was the officer on special duty for Smriti Irani from 2014-2015, junior leaders linked to the BJP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad's leader Pravin Togadia, were also on the list of potential targets.

Two phones of Rahul Gandhi were on the target list from mid-2018 to mid-2019, but could not be examined as he does not have the handsets, reported The Wire. The numbers of five of his friends and acquaintances, who were neither in politics nor public affairs, were also the targets.

Ashok Lavasa, the former Election Commissioner of India, who had ruled that Prime Minister Narendra Modi violated the Model Code of Conduct during a campaign for the 2019 general elections. Moreover, three numbers linked to the Supreme Court employee who accused former CJI Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment in April 2019 were also potential targets. Eight numbers of her husband and two of his brothers were on the list.

‘No truth in reports'

The government has, however, dismissed allegations of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people, saying it "has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever". "The BJP strongly refutes and condemns the baseless and bereft of political propriety comments levelled by Congress against the BJP," said senior leader Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Political strategist Prashant Kishor

The report was published by The Wire from India and 16 other international publications including Washington Post, The Guardian and Le Monde, as media partners to an investigation conducted by Paris-based media non-profit organisation Forbidden Stories and rights group Amnesty International into a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers from across the world that are believed to have been the target of surveillance through Pegasus software of Israeli surveillance company NSO Group.

The Wire reported that forensic tests conducted as part of the media investigation project on a small cross-section of phones associated with these numbers revealed clear signs of targeting by Pegasus spyware in 37 phones, of which 10 are Indian. NSO Group, the Israeli company which sells Pegasus worldwide, says its clients, are confined to "vetted governments".

300
No. of verified phone numbers

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