Journalists and business people alike spoke of their fear of wiretapping. They said they no longer discuss important matters on the telephone. They talk in code and arrange private meetings at undisclosed locations. Many don’t even trust email. There is talk of secret email accounts, techniques for evading detection and even writing important messages in French or Chinese.

The leaking of telephone conversations between Niira Radia and others embarrassed industrialists, politicians and journalists. Everyone zoomed in on who said what to whom and when. But these issues appear largely irrelevant. What is most worrying is that government ministers can authorise wiretaps and prolonged surveillance in India without any real evidence, a court order or even a signed scrap of paper from a judge. This threatens the privacy and free speech of everyone in India.

 The original pretext for authorising the wiretaps appears absurd: that Radia acted as an agent of a foreign government or she was trying to cheat the taxman. Nearly three years into this sorry saga, no foreign agents have been caught and no tax cheats charged or convicted. There’s a legal term for when authorities listen to phone conversations to catch private citizens at something for which there is no prima facie evidence. It’s called entrapment, and it is unlawful in any democracy worthy of the name.

 We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Remember Watergate? Or President Bush’s insistence that the US Congress pass laws known as the Patriot Act which

allowed the FBI to follow or wiretap anyone they wanted following the 9/11 attacks? This kind of dark crusade is always about justifying the loss of civil liberties in order to catch wrongdoers. It’s never worth it.

 I remember my first trip to New Delhi back in the terrible autumn of 1984, when i covered the chaotic aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Right away, there was evidence that hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sikhs, were being murdered in revenge attacks, despite police assurances that the numbers were far lower. With the country in a virtual state of emergency i set up shop in the Imperial Hotel and the Press Club of India and sent my dispatches down open phone lines to London. To my knowledge, my phones were never tapped. I was never followed or harassed, even though what i broadcast and wrote was deeply critical of the authorities. My work was never interfered with. I felt completely free to work as a journalist in India and it impressed me deeply.

 A few years later, in Pakistan, i experienced the exact opposite. Then covering the Afghan-Soviet war for the BBC, i sat in my hotel room in Peshawar talking on the telephone with a mujahideen commander whom i was planning to travel with into Afghanistan. There were so many ISI spies listening and talking in the background that i couldn’t make out what my mujahideen contact was saying. It was a surreal experience, both frightening and farcical.

 The essential question is: what kind of country does India want to become? A capitalist oligarchy that spies on its citizens? Or something far better?

 We do live in a dangerous age when covert surveillance is needed to thwart terrorist plots and to bring fanatics, gangsters, drug dealers and arms smugglers to justice. These are existential threats to the state. But to spy on citizens or businesses with no record of criminal behaviour? Ridiculous.

 This behaviour is not tolerated in most democracies, at least not for long. Nixon was driven from office because of Watergate and Bush became the most unpopular president in a century. More recently, when Britain’s News of the World was caught wiretapping public figures, two journalists went to jail, one lost his job at Number 10 Downing Street and the newspaper has already paid out £1.7 million to settle lawsuits. Yet in India, the police, government, opposition parties and the courts all stood idly by while the ‘Radia tapes’ were unlawfully leaked and disseminated.

 Seven or eight agencies in India appear to have the authority to conduct covert investigations without judicial oversight. Ministers promise to rein them in and introduce reforms, but that is difficult to believe. The very way in which these tapes were leaked shows that money was changing hands and that no one can be trusted with such explosive material. Allegations are almost impossible to refute once lodged. The accused are convicted by public opinion before they ever enter a courtroom.

 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a man who has known firsthand the pain of injustice. A long-time champion of reform, he has the moral authority to act decisively and end the Stasilike tactics that violate every citizen’s rights. It’s time for him to lead the way.

 The writer is a journalist.

Just who is listening in?             

Source: Times of India