“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself”
– George Orwell, 1984
Supreme Court orders don’t usually start with quotes from George Orwell, but its order of 27 October 2021 on the Pegasus matter does. The first paragraph of India’s top court’s judicial order also uses the term ‘Orwellian’: “The present batch of Writ Petitions raise an Orwellian concern”.
It was through this order that the court appointed a three-member committee to probe charges of using a cyber-weapon and breaching privacy of a hundred Indian civilians, some occupying high constitutional offices. If the findings of the global investigation in 'The Pegasus Project’ are to be believed, it makes India the world’s biggest democracy with the most rampant and unbridled use of the military-grade spying cyberware, which the Israeli firm has maintained it sells only to governments.
In February, the committee submitted a preliminary report, but its final conclusions are yet to come in. Pegasus, as established globally, constitutes one of the most egregious violations of the privacy of the phone (and thereby the owner of the phone) it is deployed to attack. The scandal has shaken the Israeli establishment and serious questions have arisen about the existence of its parent company, NSO.
The French, the US and almost all democracies touched by the scandal have seen their governments responding to the charges and launched investigations – all except India, as its government has stubbornly refused to answer both Parliament and the Chief Justice’s bench.