Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology Chairman Shashi Tharoor on Sunday alleged that BJP members “disrupted” the committee’s meeting on July 28 as they did not want the Pegasus allegations to be discussed and the bureaucrats who were to testify “appear to have been instructed not to attend”. He, however, expressed hope the snooping issue would be taken up by the panel in the days to come.
Tharoor has already written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to take action against the Ministry officials who skipped the meeting. He said that the actions of the three officials making “last-minute excuses” to skip the meeting were a “grievous assault” on such panels’ prerogatives to summon witnesses.
On Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks that the Opposition was insulting Parliament, Tharoor told PTI that the government’s refusal to be answerable in any way, shape, or form on an issue of national and international importance, has made a “mockery of democracy and of the ordinary Indians the government claims to represent”.
Tharoor said for two years now the IT committee has been conducting discussions on “Citizens’ data privacy and security and “cyber security, topics that also featured in its agenda under the previous chairman, BJP’s Anurag Thakur.
The Pegasus issue therefore clearly falls under the purview of the IT committee and so it is only expected that its members will ask questions about it when these topics arise, he said.
“It is no secret that the Committee’s meeting on its established agenda was disrupted by members who did not want Pegasus to be discussed. It was unprecedented for 10 members to attend and to refuse to sign the register in order to deny the Committee a quorum,” Tharoor said.
The panel was to hold a meeting on July 28 during which several issues including the Pegasus snooping allegations were expected to be discussed. It had also summoned officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Communications (Department of Telecommunications) on the subject ”Citizens data security and privacy”. However, the meeting could not take place as the BJP members of the panel did not sign the attendance register, even though they were present in the meeting room, leading to a lack of quorum.