Government, not Opposition, is in paranoia

The current Union government’s subversion of autonomous and statutory institutions matches the depth and significance of what happened during Emergency

Come elections, comes the shift in gear of the dirty-tricks department of a malevolent regime in hock to corrupt cronies. Thus, the use of the weaponised State agencies to pin down and hobble opposition parties, transgressions of the Model Code of Conduct without proportionate action from the Election Commission of India (ECI), subverted like other statutory institutions, and now the use of snoopware to hack opposition leaders and critical journalists.

Recently we got to know that Apple has sent alerts to a number of opposition leaders and journalists warning them of the possibility that their devices have been hacked and they have been targeted. Additionally, they have been told that if their hackers are State agencies, they can access sensitive data, camera, and microphone.

Given the existing technology, it cannot be ascertained for sure that State agencies are in fact the hackers, but the paw marks all over the operation strongly indicate they are.

The news was not met with a categorical denial. What it did invite was, one, rhetorical statement about the Opposition being paranoid and seeing conspiracies everywhere because they have nothing constructive to say. That could not be further from the truth.

Two, lies, the default option of the current regime. Thus, Minister of State Rajeev Chandrashekhar said that Union Minister Piyush Goyal also received the message, which suggested that Apple’s message about hacking was kosher. The claim turned out to be a lie and the media outlet dropped the ‘exclusive’ claim. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sources later said Chandrashekhar had made a mistake, while Goyal attacked the Opposition without offering a clarification.

Several things lend credence to the Opposition’s claim, and the general sense, that it was a case of clandestine and illegal State snooping: the Pegasus affair, in which the State was seen to have spied on the same kind of targets, alongside the unrefuted claims that the State planted evidence on the devices of a Bhima-Koregaon accused; the fact that only Opposition figures and regime critics have been snooped on in both cases; independent confirmation of the validity of similar Apple alerts in Russia; and, reports that the Union government has sought new spyware contracts starting at $16 million and potentially going up to $120 million.

Alongside the clandestine spying, there has been the tactic, now perfected by a psychotically authoritarian and sectarian regime, of using law-enforcement authorities to target the Opposition on trumped-up charges at convenient times — usually in the run-up to elections or when opposition parties are engaged in programmes of mass mobilisation. On October 26, the Enforcement Directorate raided Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Dotasara in connection with investigations into the leak of examination papers when he was education minister — between December 2018 and November 2021; and issued a summons to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot’s son in a 12-year-old case. Raids on Congress leaders have become the norm in Chhattisgarh, with a slew of them being conducted in August.

No investigations and raids have been conducted, however, in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh which have been dogged by the issue of paper leaks. Madhya Pradesh, of course, is in another category. There the Vyapam scam was buried by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) despite the death in suspicious circumstances of at least 40 and up to 100 people connected to it, because the money trail threatened to go right to the top of the BJP hierarchy. The State has been unrelentingly embroiled in scandals related to paper leaks and recruitment.

The current regime’s subversion of autonomous and statutory institutions matches the depth and significance of what happened during Emergency. Most recently, the ECI forbade the Union government from deploying bureaucrats to publicise its achievements in states going to the polls, but allowed it to go ahead everywhere else. Arguably, the entire exercise should have been scrapped and penalties imposed, which didn’t happen.

Nor were prohibitions or strictures forthcoming when it came to light that the defence ministry had instructed its departments to set up ‘selfie points’, at which Prime Minister and BJP’s tallest leader Narendra Modi’s cutouts would bulk large and the government’s achievements be highlighted: citizens would, thus, be involved by stealth in campaigning for the regime and the party that runs it.

The Opposition is not in paranoia mode; the government and the BJP are. This is why they are resorting to every possible tactic, except the good governance of which they are incapable, to capture power.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.