Summary:
Guwahati, Jan 24 (PTI) Leader of Opposition in Assam Assembly Debabrata Saikia on Monday expressed suspicion that his telephone was being illegally tapped by the BJP-led state government.
The senior Congress leader also claimed that such an act was an attempt to “strangle democracy, which is already in ICU”.
Talking to reporters here, Saikia claimed that the Pegasus spyware controversy had exposed the illegal tapping of phones of important personalities in the country.
The spyware row erupted in July last year after an international consortium of media outlets and investigative journalists reported that the phones of several Indian ministers, politicians, activists, and journalists were potentially targeted by Pegasus, Israeli company NSO Group’s phone hacking software.
“The Pegasus controversy had revealed that the government was tapping phones of leaders of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) movement in Assam.
And the Congress had been at the fore of this movement from the beginning,” he said.