Stronger action on US spying needed

While the external affairs ministry has done what is expected of it in such circumstances — summon a senior US diplomat to express outrage, and say that spying on an Indian entity is unacceptable — it is evident that the ruling BJP is not frothing at the mouth following the revelation that America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had permitted the National Security Agency in 2010 to spy on the saffron party.

It was inappropriate for the party not to state its position through an authorised statement. This lends its view — articulated through a short tweet of a party spokesman as well as a remark of I&B minister Prakash Javadekar — the quality of being somewhat ad hoc, and perhaps lacking in gravity. Nevertheless, the party seems to have struck a balance.

The BJP has decided to check the authenticity of the report carried by the Washington Post newspaper. This, of course, is disingenuous. The information comes from a document leaked to the media by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, the source of all revelations about NSA’s activities. But the basic point is that the party is looking to place the story in perspective.

For one, it is not known if the BJP was actually spied on. And two, it merely figured as  one of the six political parties worldwide (including the Pakistan People’s Party) besides international organisations such as the World Bank, IMF, ADB, and the EU in addition to 193 governments — India included — on which intelligence gathering by the NSA was authorised by a US court.

While attempting to eschew playing the righteous victim and placing the issue in context, the BJP would recall that the initial India-related disclosure based on the Snowden leaks had thrown light on activities in the Congress party gleaned by a low-level US embassy official in India through an even lower-level presumed Congress source. More importantly, the NSA has spied on the Indian embassy in Washington and India has remonstrated. It may be that the Americans have tried to penetrate other sensitive systems and we don’t know since what we do know is only through the Snowden documents.
India must protest robustly and take action against the Americans for spying, and not just on the BJP if that has actually happened. But while doing so, New Delhi cannot lose sight of the fact that India-US bilateral relations, and the convergence of India’s interests with those of Washington on many international questions, cannot be limited by the spying question. This is true of the relationship of all countries with the US, a crypto-imperialist power with interests worldwide.