Who’s Bugging the Finance Minister?
There rarely is a dull moment in Indian politics. The latest is the hasty attempt to hush up the bugging of the finance ministry offices. Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister himself has dismissed the episode as “bogus”. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) says no such bugging took place. And Home minister P. Chidambaran, to whom the IB reports, says he didn’t know about the bugging till he saw it in the newspapers last week. But the controversy refuses to die down.
According to The Indian Express which broke the story, on September 4, 2010, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), an agency that reports to the Finance Ministry, brought in a team of private sleuths to conduct a security sweep of the offices to check for eavesdropping devices. They found “plantable adhesive substances” in 16 locations in the office of the Finance Minister, the offices of his long-time aide Omita Paul, and personal secretary Manoj Pant as well as two conference rooms. Groove marks were found on the “adhesive substances”, suggesting that bugging devices were planted and removed later to wipe out surveillance trail.
Three days later, Mukherjee wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to launch a “secret probe” into the “serious breach of security”. He said no “live microphone” or recording devices were found but it could have “wider ramifications”. The Prime Minister then directly tasked the then IB chief, Rajiv Mathur, to probe Mukherjee’s complaint rather than passing it on to Chidambaram. The IB conducted its investigations and reported that there was no breach of security. A Home Ministry official told The Economic Times, “The IB probe concluded that the adhesive may just be chewing gum left behind by careless visitors or maintenance staff. The matter was subsequently treated as closed around six months back.” But why would any visitor or cleaning staff discard chewing gum or adhesives in a minister’s high-security office?
The corridors of power are rife with conspiracy theories. Leading the suspect list is Mukherjee’s political opponents.
Observers point to the simmering mistrust within the higher echelons of government. Given that Mukherjee wields a great degree of influence within the UPA, and is a strong contender for prime ministership after Manmohan Singh, perhaps someone within the Congress party wanted to keep a tab on him or pull him down a notch or two. It’s not the first time that such cloak and dagger activities have come to light. In May 2010, Outlook magazine reported how senior leaders like Sharad Pawar and Digvijay Singh had been illegally tapped. Sources told the Outlook that during the July 2008 no-confidence motion on the Indo-US nuclear deal, bugging devices were used extensively to listen in on the conversations of opposition leaders. Years ago, Zail Singh, former president of India felt that the Rashtrapati Bhawan was tapped. He told Vir Sanghvi, well known columnist and former editor, Hindustan Times, that he made it a point to discuss sensitive matters in the garden. Key officials and journalists are on the government’s watch list and their cell phones are allegedly tapped regularly.
Another theory doing the rounds is that a business house had engineered the bugging. Sources told The Times of India, “There are many private sector players who could be interested. If they were aware of a particular meeting on a subject crucial to their bottom line, then a corporate could take such a risk,” he said. So if a corporate house was to “buy off a lower level staff”, these transmitters could be smuggled in. “And the easiest way to plant them is using adhesives,” he adds. But why would businessmen adopt such risky options when they can easily find out what they want through their informants in the ministry or political cronies?
Yet another theory is the involvement of the foreign hand. Agencies seeking policy-related information critical for their governments to gain advantage from Indian deals or projects could have planted the bugs. For instance, there have been periodic reports of attempts from China to access classified information. Last year, Chinese hackers tried taking over websites and email accounts of government officials. Sounds a bit farfetched though!
But there’s not enough evidence to conclusively prove any of the conspiracy theories.
Asked if Mukherjee’s office bugged, B. Raman, a former senior RAW official, told the Outlook magazine, “Circumstantially yes if one takes into account the important position occupied by him in the Cabinet, his important role involving sensitive discussions in his office on many sensitive issues of a political nature and the suspicion that there are question marks over his head in the Congress leadership. Technically, it would depend on where the adhesive material was found. If it was found at places easily visible to the naked eye, then the allegations may not be correct. If the adhesive was found at places not easily visible to the naked eye, the allegation will acquire some credibility.”
Had the bugging device been found, there would have been valid ground for the charges. With just “adhesives” stuck in 16 locations, there’s no way the bugging can be proved or traced. A retired senior official known for his expertise in technical intelligence told The Times of India that as a snooping operation, it was poorly done. “There are far more sophisticated ways of monitoring,” he said. For instance, the telephone could have been converted into a transmitter, using laser beams. Solar-charged transmitters could have been planted in photo-frames etc. “Adhesives are used to stick transmitters that secretly record voice in a premise. It is then transmitted to a recorder kept at a distance. If this was the case in Mukherjee’s office, he may have been either a victim of a one-off snooping for a few hours, or sustained snooping over a long period of time,” the official added.
The speculation will continue. And we’ll likely never know the truth.
By on 29/06/2011