Hopeful IT Panel Will Take Up Pegasus: Shashi Tharoor Pulls Up BJP Govt Over 'Unprecedented' Disruption

The former union minister, however, expressed hope that the snooping issue would be taken up by the panel going forward.

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New Delhi: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who is the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT, on Sunday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members of disrupting the panel’s last meeting on July 28 stating they did not want the Pegasus-related allegations to be discussed.

He added the officials who were to testify “appear to have been instructed not to attend”.

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The former union minister, however, expressed hope that the snooping issue would be taken up by the panel going forward.

Putting the onus on the BJP for the Parliament logjam, Tharoor accused the ruling party of reducing the “temple of democracy to a rubber stamp for its agenda or worse, a notice board to announce its unilateral decisions”.

Launching a vitriolic attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his remarks that the Opposition was insulting Parliament, he said 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”.

Responding to a poser if going forward the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology will be able to take up the Pegasus snooping issue, Tharoor said the IT committee has for two years now been conducting discussions on citizens’ data privacy and security and cybersecurity, topics that also featured in its agenda under the previous chairman BJP's Anurag Thakur.

“It is no secret that the Committee's meeting on its established agenda was disrupted by BJP 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,” PTI quoted Tharoor as saying in an interview.

The Congress leader, who has written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to take action over ministry officials not attending the panel meeting, emphasized that actions of the three officials making “last-minute excuses” to skip the meeting were a “grievous assault” on such panels' prerogatives to summon witnesses.