RTI reveals mass surveillance during the UPA era

Congress President Rahul Gandhi has been in the habit of maligning the Modi government on every issue under the sun even without having any knowledge or understanding of the ramifications of a particular development. In his latest uninformed tirade against the Modi government, the Congress president has tried to corner the government over the latest MHA directive specifying authorities which are allowed to intercept, monitor, and decrypt any information generated, received or stored in any computer.

As opposed to what the Congress, entire opposition and the mainstream media is claiming, the latest MHA directive has just the intentions of putting an end to illegal surveillance & make sure only competent authorities can access citizens’ data. Prior to this order, the UPA government had brought the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009. The Rules provided, ‘No person shall carry out the interception or decryption of any information except by an order issued by the competent authority’. However, the government did not specify the competent authority. Since the term competent authority was not defined; this ambiguity could have easily led to arbitrary surveillance.

Reply to an RTI revealed that as many as 9,000 phones and 500 e-mails were intercepted every month during the UPA era. According to the November 2013 RTI, addressed to the ministry of home affairs, “on an average, anywhere between 7,500 and 9,000 orders for interception of telephones are issued by the central government per month.” Moreover, it also stated, “orders between 300 and 500 for the interception of e-mails are also issued on a monthly basis.”

https://twitter.com/abhina_prakash/status/1076406762503163905?s=21

Congress president went on to claim that Prime Minister Modi is an ‘insecure dictator,’ on the issue of the surveillance order. He wrote on Twitter, “Converting India into a police state isn’t going to solve your problems, Modi Ji. It’s only going to prove to over 1 billion Indians, what an insecure dictator you really are.”

It is preposterous how Rahul Gandhi is making such undignified remarks when the UPA itself was involved in a rampant surveillance. It was the UPA government which had converted India into a police state by not even specifying authorities that were competent to carry out surveillance. The Modi government is now only cleaning up the mess created by the previous government. One word that describes what Rahul Gandhi is doing with this issue is hypocrisy. It goes on to show how the Congress and its president are hell-bent on peddling malicious propaganda against the incumbent government even if it comes at the cost of misleading the entire nation.