The Karnataka government has been instructed to investigate a complaint made by former Chief Minister and Congress leader Siddaramaiah that he was spied on using the Pegasus spyware.
Siddaramaiah, the Karnataka opposition leader, petitioned the Union government through the President’s secretariat on July 22, 2021, claiming that he had been the object of “illegal spying and surveillance” with the infamous Pegasus malware.
On September 13, the President’s secretariat forwarded the subject to the MHA in response to the petition.
“Since police and public order are state subjects under the Constitution of India’s Seventh Schedule,” the MHA wrote to the state chief secretary on October 25, “it is the responsibility of the concerned state government to help, descry, register crime, and make the perpetrators involved through the ministry of its law enforcement agencies, and therefore you may take action on the representation, as supposed applicable.”
According to Siddaramaiah, M Venkatesh, a close associate of Siddaramaiah, was caught illegally utilising the Pegasus malware. The blameworthiness was established when a global group of intelligencers discovered that the spyware was being used to spy on people all across the world.
Prior to the fall of a Congress-JDS government in Karnataka in 2019, the phones of top Karnataka political leaders like Siddaramaiah, also-JDS Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, and Congress deputy CM G Parameshwara may have been targeted for espionage using the Israeli establishment NSO’s Pegasus spyware, according to the intelligencer’s institute.
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