With Narendra Modi government yet to shed light on whether it is a client of the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group that sells the Pegasus spyware, new reports have revealed an array of names of prominent Indian activists who appeared on the target list of the snooping project.

The Wire, one of the news mediums who investigated the Pegasus snoop files,  unearthed telephone numbers of several prominent activists from a leaked database of the spyware company.

The activists include Ashok Bharti; former Jawahar Lal Nehru University students Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya and Banjyotsna Lahiri; academic and chronicler of life in Naxal-dominated regions, Bela Bhatia; railway union leader Shiv Gopal Mishra; anti-coal mining activist Alok Shukla; Delhi University professor Saroj Giri; Bastar-based peace activist Shubhranshu Choudhary and Bihar-based activist Ipsa Shatakshi.

The news medium however clarified that without conducting digital forensics on the phones of these activists, it is impossible to establish whether their phones were hacked or infected. But their appearance on the list suggests that they were persons of interest to an unidentified client of the NSO Group that was focused on India.

Ashok Bharti,  chairman of the All India Ambedkar Mahasabha, an umbrella association of Dalit rights’ groups, had led the nation-wide Bharat Bandh on April 2, 2018, against a Supreme Court ruling, which he claimed took away the teeth of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The ruling sparked massive demonstrations across the country, and the Bharat Bandh claimed 11 lives and left hundreds injured as the police took on the Dalit protesters. A few months later, Bharti gave another call for a nationwide strike on August 9. It was in the months leading up to this strike that his phone number was selected as a possible candidate for surveillance, the report said.

In 2019, WhatsApp had stated that four activists  — Saroj Giri, Bela Bhatia, Alok Shukla and Shubranshu Choudhary — were affected by a Pegasus attack that took place through a specific vulnerability in the company’s security.

Shiv Gopal Mishra,  secretary of the joint consultative machinery for the Central government employees’ union and general secretary of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation, said he was not surprised that he may have been under surveillance, the report said.

Alok Shukla, convenor of the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan (CBA), is also on the list of potential spyware targets. A vocal rights activist in Central India, he has participated in several anti-mining protests in the state.

“In the past few years, I have organised and led several protests against the Adani Group for its mindless mining project,” Shukla told The Wire. This, he said, must have made him a target of surveillance under the past Raman Singh-led BJP government in the state, as per the report.

Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid were two of the three students who were charged with sedition while they were doing their PhD in JNU.

…With IANS inputs