India's 'Watergate' couldn’t have come at a worse moment

With reports of Pegasus being used to snoop on military majors Boeing, Dassault, Saab and others, the Indian ‘Watergate’ is charting dangerous territories as it spreads from the private and the political to the corporate realm, writes ETV Bharat's senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: The Pegasus controversy that is currently hogging the headlines in India and across the globe is being dubbed as India’s ‘Watergate’ moment. The explosive Pegasus revelations extending from snooping on government ministers, opposition leaders, journalists, activists and others to corporate honchos couldn’t have come at a worse moment for India. But where it leads to is anybody’s guess.

The infamous ‘Watergate’ scandal where President Richard Nixon was caught snooping on the political opposition in the US by planting bugging devices from 1972-1974 ultimately led to his resignation on August 8, 1974.

International Implications

Latest revelations that phones of corporate bosses of defence majors like Boeing, Dassault, and Saab were broken into has a lot of ramifications because it goes against the corporate interests of the respective countries that supply major military platforms, products and weapon systems to India including the Chinook and Apache helicopters, C-17 Globemaster, Poseidon-8, the Rafale fighter to name a few.

This is at a time when the ‘Quad’ initiative is faltering as the President Joe Biden regime is trying to nudge back the Don Trump-initiated Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or ‘Quad’ to take on China thereby diminishing the primacy of India.

With India vying for a closer relationship with the EU and a new bilateral one with the US, the Pegasus affair may not be taken very kindly as there may be questions raised over India’s ‘democracy quotient’ especially in the backdrop of controversial citizenship laws (CAA), religious freedom rights, cyber laws etc.

The desire to gain constituencies abroad, therefore, may suffer a setback on the back of an ‘image’ issue for the government at the same time constricting India’s maneuvering space at a time it was to take major diplomatic steps.

Not much help can be expected from the Israeli quarters as the new Naftali Bennett-led government at Tel Aviv does not have much love lost for the preceding PM Benjamin Netanyahu regime and an inquiry has already been launched against the NSO, the firm that owns the Pegasus spying software. There are already reports that Netanyahu tried to push the NSO surveillance and spying tools in countries he considered allies.

Domestic Implications

Domestically, the Pegasus issue may snowball into a core plank where opposition parties can converge upon. This includes the regional forces led by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the upcoming very vital state polls in Uttar Pradesh may provide the first testing ground for a possible opposition conglomeration. With the BJP-led NDA government on the back-foot over the controversial farm laws, clearly, the Pegasus expose is something the fallout of which the BJP has not factored in till now.

“This raises the anti-Emergency paranoia and gives the opposition a relevant political tool. One has to understand that Uttar Pradesh, along with Bihar Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, were the core centres of the anti-Emergency movement. This is going to give a major fillip to regional parties and their possible alliances,” says Prof Kumar Sanjay Singh, a keen political watcher who teaches history at a Delhi University college.