Bugging in Nitin Gadkari's home: Here's why Modi govt must institute a probe

A tweeted denial from Union Minister and former BJP president Nitin Gadkari insisting that reports of listening devices being found in his New Delhi home are “highly speculative” did nothing to douse the political bushfire. Expectedly, the Congress smirked through the confusion, calling it emblematic of a lack of faith and trust among the top echelons of the NDA. [caption id=“attachment_1622735” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Nitin Gadkari. AFP[/caption] The controversy erupted after news reports claimed that a listening device was found in the bedroom of the minister’s residence, 13 Teen Murti Lane in new Delhi. A debugging exercise had been ordered immediately, the report said, adding that the discovery itself had been accidental. It, of course, didn’t help the NDA’s problem of perception that the report had been published by The Sunday Guardian, founded by MJ Akbar who is now a BJP spokesperson. Congress leaders Manish Tewari and Randeep Singh Surjewala got into the act immediately, demanding that the BJP come clean on the matter. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh commented on the subject too, speaking unexpectedly at an iftaar party organised by Congress party president Sonia Gandhi. It’s very unfortunate. I hope whatver is reported is not true. It should be investigated. How can it happen? It should be explained by the government in the House," PTI quoted Singh as having said. But Intelligence officials insisted no such debugging exercise had been ordered at all. A report in The Times of India quoted one official as saying: “No Delhi Police or IB personnel were called in for a debugging exercise after the alleged listening device was discovered… in the normal course, this would have been the standard procedure.” If such a debugging exercise had indeed been carried out, then any discovered device or devices would have been sent for analysis to a forensic laboratory. This too had not been done, the report said. Another official was quoted speculating that perhaps the news report had actually meant the highways and road transport minister’s Mumbai home – but the Mumbai Police had not been intimated either. A Hindustan Times report quoted an IB official as saying ministers’ offices are regularly swept by the bureau, especially in the case of ministries thta handle sensitive issues, but nobody had heard of a residence being swept. Snoop-sanitising is common in government offices. There have been high-profile snooping controversies in the past such as the reported discovery of bugging devices at then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s office in 2011 and the defence ministry during the General V K Singh-government row, the debugging exercise attracts some attention. A reason perhaps why  BJP leader Subramanian Swamy is claiming that the bugging could have been done by the UPA regime and that the discovery dates back to last year. Swamy can be dismissed as the party’s chief conspiracy theorist, and the BJP spokesperson was somewhat more cautious: “We must wait for the government’s response on whether the report is true or not,” said Sidharth Nath Singh, party spokesperson. So, is this all a political storm in a teacup? Possibly. After all, when then defence minister AK Antony’s office was suspected to have been bugged in 2012, the same theories had been expounded by the then opposition leaders. Prakash Javadekar, then BJP spokesperson, had demanded that the government come clean on whether this was a case of differences between the party and the government. Or if a foreign government was involved. There’s little doubt that there’s more convenient politics here for the Congress than real concern. But, be that as it may, there is ample cause to investigate the reports thoroughly. After all, it has been reported that among the BRICS nations, India has been the top target of snooping by the US National Security Agency. Earlier this year, when The Washington Post reported that the NSA had spied on close to 193 countries and organisations across the world, there was outrage in India that the BJP was on the list of organisations/political parties that were spied upon. The BJP promised to express its strong objections to Washington. The Hindu reported last year that NSA surveillance programmes plucking metadata from telephone call records and Internet records were highly active in gathering data from India. In the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place, the report said. That reports of listening devices being found in Gadkari’s residence should be troubling for the Narendra Modi government, if there is even a shred of evidence to substantiate them. For one, The BJP and the RSS will certainly deny that there is any internal strife in the NDA – in any case, Gadkari, Modi and current party president Amit Shah are known to be close to the RSS – and this could well be the case.  But planting bugs inside a highly secure residence indicates the possible involvement of complicit insiders, something Gadkari and his close coterie as well as other Cabinet ministers will have to consider carefully. Two, the possibility of the bugging being the handiwork of neither corporate interests nor the BJP’s own clao-and-dagger characters makes the discovery of the listening device even more serious: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to reach out to the US, he is scheduled to make a trip in coming months, the itinerary of which is being currently being finetuned. That there could be continued involvement of US spooks in the new US-India relationship cannot be good news. And finally, even if the report is not accurate, the Modi sarkar must ask itself how and why the Guardian came by this information – who leaked it to them and for what purpose. Whether or not there were listening devices in Gadkari’s residence, the news of the same cannot have been released without vested interests. The UPA government was greatly weakened by toxic internal battles – including the Pranab-Chidambaram rivalry – which proved to be an important factor in its downfall. The Modi sarkar can ill afford the same, and this early in its regime.