India’s on Lists It Shouldn’t be on

Context: When India appears alongside Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Hungary and Kazakhstan, for purportedly using government might for silencing critics by hacking into people’s privacy, something is terribly wrong.

Concerns amidst Pegasus spyware scandal

• Blackmark on India’s democratic credentials: State power and military-grade spyware misused for political gains as the Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s phone also in the hacked list.
• Threat to democratic institutions: Two of India’s shining institutions, the Election Commission and the Supreme Court, are under pressure as the hacked list includes the Election commissioner, Supreme Court judge.
• In line with India’s recent slide in rankings in many lists: 
  • In March 2021, Freedom House downgraded India from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ because it said political and civil liberties had deteriorated under the current regime.
  • Sweden-based V-Dem Institute has downgraded India from the ‘world’s largest democracy to an ‘electoral autocracy’ in this year’s annual report.
  • Latest Democracy Index of The Economist Intelligence Unit called India a ‘flawed democracy’ and pushed it down two rungs to the 53rd position.
• Spillover into strategic relations: Growing concerns in US that if India doesn’t change course, it’s going to be harder to make the differentiation why a partnership with India is of value when trying to deal with an authoritarian China

Inadequate Government response

• Disregarding as global propaganda: Home Minister stated that Pegasus investigation is nothing but a ‘report by disrupters for the obstructers’ designed to ‘humiliate India’ on the world stage and, the opposition has ‘jumped on to this bandwagon.
• Not denying usage of the spyware: Similar to the 2019 Pegasus scandal, this time too, GoI hasn’t specifically denied using Pegasus except to say that ‘each case of interception, monitoring and decryption is approved by the competent authority…’.

Conclusion: Not since the Emergency has India’s commitment to democracy been questioned this hard. The fate of Indian democracy is dubious as political leaders are imprisoned for long periods, rights activists are deemed ‘traitors’ even before trial, and journalists are surveilled for simply doing their job.