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- Published: July 19, 2021 09:31
New Delhi: An RTI reply from 2013 revealed that around 9,000 phones and 500 email accounts were watched every month by the UPA government at the time.
This comes amid controversy over the Modi government giving “snooping powers” to investigative agencies.
The response was given by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on August 6, 2013, after Prosenjit Mondal filked an RTI.
The RTI reply states, “On an average, between 7,500 to 9,000 orders for the interception of telephones and 300 to 500 orders for the interception of emails are issued by Central Government per month whereas.
During the UPA era, there were not one or two but twenty such cases when phones were tapped keeping all the rules and regulations in mind. The situation was that every month more than 9000 phones were tapped during the Congress era. Leave aside the talk of people, Congress has not spared even its loved ones.
On 19 January 2006, Amar Singh, the then general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, alleged that his phone was tapped by the Manmohan Singh government. Later other opposition leaders like Sitaram Yechury, Jayalalithaa, CB Naidu etc. made the same allegation. The reply of the then PM Manmohan Singh on this was very interesting. He told that this phone tapping was not done by the government but by a private agency. A person named Bhupinder Singh was also arrested in this connection.
On 17 October 2009, the then Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee accused the CPM government of Bengal of tapping her phone, email and even SMS. After this, on 26 April 2010, there was a situation of holocaust on phone tapping in Parliament. After all, the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that PM Manmohan Singh will present his side on this issue. Manmohan Singh rejected the opposition’s demand of JPC in this matter.
On 14 December 2010, PM Manmohan Singh, who was PM at that time, himself admitted that the phones of top corporate personalities have been tapped. He advocated it on the grounds of national security, tax evasion and money laundering. The very next day, he ordered the cabinet secretary to look into the phone tapping case and strengthen the legal framework to prevent such leaks.
On 22 June 2011, when a letter from the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee wrote a letter to the PM requesting him to conduct a secret inquiry into the bugging of his office. The special thing was that the blame was on his own cabinet colleague. Interestingly, the responsibility of debugging, that is, removing the espionage equipment, was assigned to CBDT instead of IB.
On 22 May 2011, the UPA government ordered the CBDT to continue with the phone tapping. This happened after the Committee of Secretaries had recommended against it. On 23 June 2011, CBEC Chairman S Dutt accused DRI of tapping his phones. After this, on 6 February 2013, SP leader Amar Singh accused the UPA of tapping the phone.
On 13 June 2021, BJP accused the then Gehlot government of Rajasthan of tapping the phone. The important thing is also that the Congress MLAs themselves have made serious allegations of phone tapping on the Gehlot government during its current tenure. In such a situation, there is a whole bundle of sins of phone tapping and snooping in the name of Congress, which is a very dark history of independent India.
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