Need for impartial inquiry to fix responsibility, Mayawati said on Pegasus snooping incident

The government, dismissed the allegation of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people

BSP president Mayawati on Tuesday termed the Pegasus snooping incident as a "very serious matter" and demanded an impartial inquiry into it for fixing responsibility.

“The dirty game of espionage and blackmailing is not a new thing, but breaching privacy with the help of very expensive equipments, minutely spying on ministers, opposition leaders, officers and journalists, etc. is a very serious matter. There is sensation across the country after it has been busted,” the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister said in a tweet in Hindi.

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In a related tweet, she said, “The clarifications, refutations and arguments of the Centre in this connection have failed to satisfy the people."

Due to the seriousness of the matter, it would be good for the government and the country that an independent and impartial inquiry gets conducted at the earliest so that responsibility could be fixed, Mayawati added.

An international media consortium reported on Sunday that over 300 verified mobile phone numbers, including those of two ministers, over 40 journalists, three opposition leaders and one sitting judge, besides scores of business leaders and activists in India could have been targeted for hacking through the Israeli spyware Pegasus sold only to government agencies.

The government, however, dismissed the allegation of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people, saying it "has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever".