Pegasus is Politics Stupid! Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan “The Monsoon session was a washout. And it had its driest spell”, said Atal Bihari Vajpayee, bemoaning the disruption and stonewalling of any worthwhile business in Parliament, not long ago. And he is not alive

Pegasus is Politics Stupid!

Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan

“The Monsoon session was a washout. And it had its driest spell”, said Atal Bihari Vajpayee, bemoaning the disruption and stonewalling of any worthwhile business in Parliament, not long ago. And he is not alive to talk about the blame game that has broken between the Narendra Modi administration and the opposition parties, over the damp squib monsoon session over ‘Pegasus’. Is there anything new?

BJP is a natural party of the opposition. Remember the imbroglio they perpetrated  during the paralysed UPA II dispensation over 2G scam. Congress has accomplished too little,  in comparison as the ruling party got several legislations through,  despite the hungama, including a constitutional amendment,  on identification of backward classes for reservations, by States.

Be that as it may, let us get real with this Pegasus issue. As We the People. Not as people’s representatives. If Congress was in power and they  had the benefit of Pegasus Spyware, they would not  have played a saint. All the political parties are in it, together, except that BJP happens to be in power and control now . Snooping against each other is ‘as old as the hills’ as Donald Trump said, when accused of spying even members of House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee,over UkraineGate impeachment proceedings.

It is no different in India. Snooping has always been there. It will continue to be there.Those in power will tap into it. Those out of it, only grieve over their inability. We the People are being entertained and taken for a royal  ride over Pegasus, as if it is doomsday for Indian democracy. It is not. Our democracy, that is on the ground, for us We The People, is strong and resilient, and will survive such onslaughts.

Are you then not concerned with the accusations and denial over Pegasus spyware floated by NSO? NSO Group Technologies (NSO standing for Niv, Shalev and Omri, the names of the company’s founders) is an Israeli technology firm whose spyware called Pegasus enables the remote surveillance of smartphones.It has operated through other companies around the world.Of course, one would be accused of authoritarian proclivities, if one was not concerned with it.

The pertinent point is that Pegasus alone is new. Old wine in new Pegasus bottle. World over, politicians are the same. They snoop each other all the time. Trump snooped on Democrats and journalists associated with New York Times, Washington Post,CNN, MSNBC et al. Despite Joe Biden taking over on Jan 20,2021, it did not cease for six months, until it was raked up. You get the point.

Let us get to We the People. Foundationally, thanks to Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) verdict from the Nine Judges’ bench of the Supreme Court, right to privacy is now a fundamental right in India. ‘ Right to be let alone’ as Justice Louis Brandeis famously said in 1890 in  a Harvard Law Review,  matters and is consequential.

But do We the People care for it? In this digital age when the World is Flat as Thomas Friedman picked upon on Nandan Nilekani idea for his 2004 best seller. Mind you,  it was only later than 2004, as Friedman said ‘things started to happen at an exponential and frenetic pace’. In 2007,  Steve Jobs came up with I Phone, Mark Zuckerberg went global with Facebook, Jack Dorsey launched the ubiquitous Twitter, Adobe named after the inventor’s son’s toy elephant went viral,Google launched the open source system Android and bought the TV company called You Tube,Jeff Bezos and Amazon gave us the e-book reader Kindle, IBM launched its cognitive computer Watson which beat the world champion in the game of Go and in tandem  they led to ‘Big Data’,  becoming the new oil.

‘We the People were sucked and hooked onto these social media revolutions’ said Simon Sinek, the optimists’ guide. ‘ Alas, We the People willingly gave up on our freedoms and right to privacy by signing up for all these social media platforms’ said Tristan Harris, a formal Google Ethicist. And his documentary ‘ Social Dilemma’ on Netflix  (94 minutes) has become a blockbuster and picked up, by close to a billion viewers in over 190 countries in multiple languages, with 38,000,000 viewers in first 28 days. On the pernicious practices, to which, We the People have passionately succumbed to.

What are we then talking about, as if the snooping by Pegasus software was the new kid on the block or that governments were resorting to  surreptitious surveillance of society. Sorry, we are all under a Universal Digital Dictatorship regime, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it .

Just the other day, a judge of a constitutional court related this experience. “ I left Bombay by flight midnight. Even before I landed at my destination,  I had multiple text messages suggesting  to me an alternate and inexpensive transit route. How the hell did anyone know,  I was flying that night and time and where to?”.

Pegasus is real. But not the ghastly terrorist at work. Don’t ask me. Ask the better informed.Talking about her recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,Professor Shoshana Zuboff, an American author, Harvard professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar- , says: how global tech companies such as Google,Amazon, and Facebook  et al have persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information (“data”) gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the “surveillance capitalism” in the title, which Zuboff defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”.

Snooping political rivals or inconvenient journalists is abhorrent. Pegasus Spyware, with Israeli connect, from a private enterprise, was meant to protect States against terrorists. We are always creative. We invent better uses for our own selfishness and survival of the fittest faculties. Even in the land of the free, from which came Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to lecture us on democratic values,in  the wake of Pegasus scandal, quietly departed when  ‘he was told off’. Living in glass houses, he knew better..

Let the politicians fight. They are born to. For their own survival and more than subsistence. Parliamentary sessions being washed out is no big deal. Anyway, who would have listened to their ‘erudite debates’. Our representatives mark their presence with walkouts and disruptions. And Arun Jaitley justified them during the 2G times. It is just that it is Pegasus time.

Truth is that neither snooping is new nor Pegasus is a Pandemic. We the People have already volunteered to be infected by the social media viruses. There is no vaccination for it. Except a “A World Without E Mail’, authored by Cal Newport, an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Georgetown University.

We are not scared of Pegasus. Even the politicians are not. It is just that the opposition is now at the wrong end of the stick. They love to be on the right side. The tussle is all about it. And Parliament is not the functional institution our founders meant it to be.We have Judiciary to ‘make law’.

And we have  very little to lose over our Right to Privacy, which we have already surrendered endearingly,to the digital platforms. Let us enjoy the hungama over Pegasus for  what it is. An entertaining disruption,of little consequence, with lots of enterprise and energy, to keep us hooked over these ideological food fights as Michael Sandel called them, with time on  our hand, in these Pandemic times, as We the People.

(Practising advocate in the Madras High court and author of ‘Constitution and its Making- Musings, Anecdotes and Episodes, OakBridge)