Pegasus row: Snooping has always existed, it's just become more brazen, intrusive and tech-savvy | OPINION

By Rajdeep Sardesai: In the last few days, the national media has been abuzz with reports over the Snoopgate or Pegasusgate as it's being called - the data leaks from India and across the world that suggest that thousands of phone lines could have been tracked, some of them hacked, using an Israeli spyware called Pegasus.

I'm not surprised by the revelation. I'm surprised by the number of people I meet who are surprised by the revelation. Because anyone who has been involved in professionally tracking politics in this country, as I have, can tell you that 'we have heard about snooping for the longest time.'

The big Indian state is, as I call it, a Snoopstate. Surveillance is part of our political culture. Maybe those outside the Delhi Lutyens' bubble are more surprised because their world is different. I was privileged, in a way, to grow up in Mumbai - a much more innocent city in some way, a city of commerce and not of political intrigue.

Which is why the Mumbaikar was more interested in 'How I will catch my 5.45 pm local'. Many were more interested in the stock market - Dalal Street me kya ho raha hai and not so much in what's happening in Parliament. It's when I came to Delhi in the early 1990s that I realised what this real world of snooping was all about.

Sometime in 1995, I was tracking the story of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) MPs who had allegedly been bribed by the Narsimha Rao government during a vote of confidence. I was with a CBI officer in Ambassador Hotel in Khan Market. We were sitting in a restaurant and, halfway through our conversation, the officer tells me - 'I have to leave.'

Later on, he told me why. He feared we were being snooped upon.

I must confess I was a little surprised. Why would anyone snoop on a CBI officer when the CBI is supposed to snoop on others? And that's when I realised there is a state within the state - a deep state that at one level, in a sense, works on surveillance. I was innocent, naive; call me a Mumbaikar in exile in Delhi. But that's what happened then.

Truth is, my friends, every government-and we can go back to possibly Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as well-has at some point or the other, I'm sure, tracked or spied on what's going on around them. That's the nature of the power game in this country.

Indira Gandhi, for example. During her time, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) was a parallel power centre and was used rather ruthlessly by Mrs Gandhi to track down political rivals and even her ministers. You might recall that Karnataka chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde later lost his job because he was accused of phone-tapping his rivals-an accusation that was found to be true.

But it was a more innocent age. It was the age of good, old-fashioned jasoos. At best, you had your landline and possibly someone was listening in through a crackle on the other line. You didn't have the mobile. The surveillance was, you could argue, a little less intrusive and certainly less tech-driven and sophisticated.

There was a lot of physical tracking as well. Remember 1991. Rajiv Gandhi claimed that the Chandrashekar government was spying on him. And that led to the fall of his government. What was the evidence that Rajiv Gandhi was providing? Two people had been seen outside his 10 Janpath residence. They, later on, turned out to be Haryana CID policemen Raj Singh and Prem Singh. It was an age when spying was also amateurish.

Today, it's far more sophisticated and certainly much more ruthless. This is the age of surveillance becoming far more upgraded; this is the age of Narendra Modi. And, therefore, jasoosi is, dare I say, more brazen in both qualitative and quantitative terms.

Let me explain a story - you might have read my book (I hope you have). "2019 How Modi won India". On page 42, I relate an incident of 2008-09, told to me by Gandhinagar-based journalist Rajiv Shah, confirmed to me by Gujarat IPS officers. There was a lot of speculation in Gandhinagar that ministers and officials were being spied upon by the government. I remember meeting Gordhan Zadafia, then an opponent of Mr Modi and now back in the BJP. I was to interview him. He said: 'Please come through the back gate. Somebody will be tracking your movements and let's not talk on the mobile.' There was a fear factor.

I relate an incident of how the then minister of state for home in Gujarat, Amit Shah, calls for a meeting of all top IPS officials and lays out a demonstration of an Israeli phone-tapping machine. Mind you, an Israeli phone-tapping machine. And then I quote him as telling the officials: 'You just have to enter a code, and you can listen to any phone conversation you want using this machine.' Now, we don't know whether the Gujarat government acquired the machine, but the IPS officers tell me they were frightened. Some of them then got two mobile phones - one for official communication and one for personal conversations.

And I don't know whether the spyware used was Pegasus - although it was an Israeli company that was doing the demo - but the fact is, the Gujarat government was considering, 12 years ago, the possibility of acquiring Israeli spying equipment.

Some would say the intrusive Gujarat model has gone national. The old-style jasoos monitoring your movement is replaced by this new-age technology which can track your life 24x7 by infiltrating your mobile.

The Pegasus list suggests that at least 300 people in India were 'persons of interest.' It doesn't mean that all their phones were hacked or tracked but I'm willing to bet that, forget 300, many more people are part of the IB, security agencies network of the surveillance state.

Much of this is being carried out outside of the official state machinery. So even the minister of IT or Law may not know at any given time whose phone is being snooped upon. There is, in a sense, an element of unauthorised snooping that goes on in this country, despite what the government says.

The official reason for any phone tap will be given as national security. The real reason is that a powerful state and its leadership are deeply insecure and, yes, authoritarian. What's changed is that we've moved from Gandhinagar to New Delhi and from Gordhan Zadafia to, dare I say, Rahul Gandhi.

This Snoopstate, my friends, is not just a violation of individual privacy as it's being made out to be. It's an assault on our democracy, our democratic and personal freedom.

The question really is: Do we, as citizens, really care enough about the right to privacy, about a disfigured democracy, to make a noise about this issue? Or are we too caught up in our lives, day-to-day existence, especially in Covid times, to worry about concepts of accountability? Do we, thereby, allow those in power to get away with what prima facie would be seen as an act of criminality?

Let me confess. As a journalist, I was actually a tad disappointed to find that my name was not there on this Pegasus list as a potential target. Not for any other reason but the fact that I'm pretty certain that someone is out there snooping on me. And I'm also seen by some as an "anti-national" journalist. It's a professional hazard - one that I have learned to live with over the years.

In fact, it's the normalisation of this surveillance state that should trouble us all. People say: ye toh hota hi hai; look at Congress-ruled Rajasthan, there are allegations of phone-tapping; Pranab Mukherjee, when he was a UPA minister, claimed that his office was bugged. Now it's the BJP-ruled Centre that's facing such accusations.

No, my friends. This whataboutery must stop. Hacking is a crime. Spying without authorisation is a crime. And we as citizens and institutions must be ready to fight back whenever it happens and demand a minimal level of accountability. In France, its president, under the scanner for the so-called hacking, is ordering a probe.

Why can't we do a probe in India? What's it that the Indian state wants to hide by living in denial and shooting the messenger i.e. the journalist? We're a strong state, aren't we? We have nothing to fear. I hope so.

Think about it.

{Views expressed are personal}