MONSOON SESSION

minister Jawaharlal Nehru that new ministers are introduced to the House.

Goyal condemned the behaviou” of the Opposition and said such conduct would be harmful to the democratic traditions of the country.

Soon after Lok Sabha met at 11am, four new members who recently got elected in bypolls took oath as members.

When Speaker Om Birla asked PM Modi to introduce the new ministers, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabja and Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said his party has given notices to discuss issues, including economy and (rising) prices.

Members from Congress and Trinamool Congress (TMC) raised placards demanding the withdrawal of “black laws” on agriculture. Parliamentary affairs minister Prahlad Patel said the PM should be allowed to introduce the ministers as per convention and the issues can be raised later.

The Speaker appealed to the Opposition members to not disrupt the proceedings.

“You have been in power too. You should not lower the dignity of the House. You are breaking a good tradition. This is the largest democracy and you are setting a bad precedent. I appeal you to maintain the dignity of the House,” Birla told the opposition members.

However, they did not relent. Modi requested the Speaker to consider the ministers introduced and he would lay a copy of the names on the table.

Criticising the Opposition, defence minister Rajnath Singh said it was happening for the first time in his 24 years of parliamentary career. “The strength of Parliament is in maintaining healthy traditions. Both Opposition and Treasury should maintain healthy traditions. Even if one or 50 new ministers are inducted, the whole House listens to their introduction by the prime minister with decorum... This is sad, unfortunate and an unhealthy approach,” Singh, who is also the deputy leader of Lok Sabha, said.

However, in 2004, then prime minister Manmohan Singh could not introduce the ministers in his Cabinet in the Parliament—the BJP protested the inclusion of late Mohammed Taslimuddin, and Lalu Prasad Yadav in the council of ministers.

Congress MP Manickam Tagore also said there was a second incident in 2013 wherein former Prime Minister Singh wasn’t allowed to introduce his ministers in the House. “So, the BJP cannot say that this has never happened before,” he said.

The Lower House also paid tributes to 40 former members who passed away in recent months.

As Speaker Birla started making obituary references, he asked opposition members to leave the Well and return to their seats at least during obituaries.

The members then returned to their seats.

After the House stood in silence for the departed former colleagues, Harsimrat Kaur Badal (SAD) and some Congress members said obituaries should also be paid to those agitating farmers who have died in the recent past.

As the disruptions continued despite Birla’s repeated pleas to maintain decorum, the House was adjourned after nearly 40 minutes till 2 PM.

Later, the proceedings of Lok Sabha were adjourned for the second time amid sloganeering by opposition members over various issues, including those related to rising prices and the new farm laws.

Rajendra Agrawal, who was in the Chair, adjourned the House till 3:30 PM barely 10 minutes after proceedings began at 2 PM.

Agrawal urged members to go back to their seats and allow the House to function normally, but as protests continued, he adjourned the proceedings.

Earlier, four newly elected members -- Maddila Gurumoorthy (YSR Congress), Mangal Suresh Angadi (BJP), MP Abdussamad Samadani (IUML), Vijayakumar (Congress) -- took oath as the House convened after a gap of nearly four months.

Meanwhile, in Rajya Sabha, Chairman Venkaiah Naidu did not allow the 17 notices by different opposition parties to suspend the scheduled business of the House and take up the matters raised by them.

He said it was not feasible to take 17 issues in one go, and assured the members that all the important matters would be taken up in due course of time.

But the assurance did not pacify the opposition members who continued to protest, forcing Naidu to adjourn the House first till 2 PM and then till 3 PM.

The House was later adjourned for the day amid continued sloganeering by the Opposition. yesterday night .... The press report appeared a day before the Monsoon session of the Parliament.

“This cannot be a coincidence. In the past similar claims were made regarding the use of Pegasus on Whatsapp. Those reports have no factual basis and were categorically denied by all parties .... The press report of July 18, 2021 also appeared to be an attempt to malign the Indian democracy and a well-established institution,” the minister said.

The first part of the multipart investigation, released late on Sunday night, said that 38 Indian journalists (according to The Guardian), including those from mainstream publications (three current Hindustan Times journalists are named, as is one from sister publication Mint), and websites, apart from freelancers were targeted. The 38 are among 180 journalists the report said were targeted worldwide, including the editor of the Financial Times Roula Khalaf, and journalists from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times, and Le Monte.

In the second part of the investigation released on Monday, The Wire reported that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Union minister of state Prahlad Singh Patel, former chief election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, election strategist Prashant Kishor and the Supreme Court staffer who accused former chief justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment were also targets for surveillance

Even Vaishnaw appeared to have been targeted in 2017 when he was neither a minister nor an MP and not a member of the BJP, even as he defended the Modi-led government on Monday.

The investigation was based on a data leak of around 50,000 numbers obtained by Amnesty International and Paris-based Forbidden Stories, a non-profit. To be sure, as the methodology of the investigation explains, the presence of a number does not indicate the individual’s phone was hacked — just that it was of interest. Amnesty International subsequently forensically investigated 67 of these phones, and found 23 hacked and 14 showing signs of attempted penetration.

The Wire reported that 10 of the phones forensically examined in India showed they had either been hacked or signs of an attempted hacking.

NSO Group, in a response to Forbidden Stories and its media partners, said the interpretations from the leaked dataset were misleading. “The alleged amount of ‘leaked data of more than 50,000 phone numbers,’ cannot be a list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus,” it said, and added that it “does not have insight into the specific intelligence activities of its customers”.

The Wire also said many businesspeople, and one constitutional authority were among those targeted. These names are expected to emerge over the next few days in subsequent installments of the investigation. The website also said relatives of activists accused in the Elgar Parishad case were also targeted.

Pegasus makes it possible for those using the software to intercept all communications on their targets’ device, including stored files as well as messages. The malware also allows for the device’s microphone and camera to be turned on, and its location logs accessed.

According to the Guardian report, the list of governments believed to be NSO customers, and who entered the numbers that were part of the leaked database are: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the UAE.

Vaishnaw said that there were inconsistencies in the report. “One report clearly states that the presence of a number on NSO’S list does not mean it is under surveillance,” he said. “The consortium has accessed a leaked database of 40,000 numbers. The presence of the number does not indicate whether there was an attempted hack, or a successful one,” he said.

Citing NSO’S statement calling the report misleading, the minister said, “The response also states that the names of the countries using Pegasus is incorrect.”

However, opposition parties hit out at the Centre over the alleged phone-tapping of prominent personalities in the country and demanded an independent judicial or parliamentary committee probe.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi took a swipe at PM Narendra Modi on the matter using the hashtag “Pegasus”. “We know what he’s been readingeverything on your phone,” Gandhi wrote Monday as a tweet-reply to his own post two days ago in which he had asked people, “I’m wondering what you guys are reading these days.”

Terming it a very serious issue concerning national security, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor demanded an independent judicial or parliamentary committee probe.

The Communist Party of India [CPI(M)] said that two years ago, the party had raised in Parliament that this “dangerous spyware” was being used in India as revealed by Whatsapp. “The Modi government’s response had not categorically denied that it engaged the services of NSO but claimed that there is no “unauthorized surveillance”. With these revelations, it is clear that this government has engaged NSO for such surveillance against its own citizens,” the party said in a statement.

The TMC said it will raise the issue in Parliament.

“It is a serious issue and the minister in his statement in the House does not deny that the government was using the software. We will raise this issue in Parliament,” said TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’ Brien. mation on their condition and service capabilities.

While Ghaziabad-based Gram Pathshala’s movement’s objective is to give village students a convivial space to study, Noida-based organisation, Sarvahitey’s project Paper Bridge, aims to set up 1,000 libraries with the larger objective “to unify India culturally” and reduce a sense of alienation among the geographically isolated communities. Prem Prakash, the co-founder of Paper Bridge, says the organisation has set up over 300 libraries in villages in 11 states of the country, including the Northeast and Kashmir. “We have also set up about 150 libraries in the Naxalaffected rural areas of Jharkhand,” he says.

The organisation runs book donation drives at schools, colleges, corporate houses and has so far collected over 200,000 books. “We encourage people donating books to write a message on them for the people in the region where the books are destined. These messages act as a soft bridge between people; that is why we have named the project Paper Bridge,” he adds.

Among the villages where libraries have come up in the past few years, the most famous is Bhilar, near Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra. Famous as ‘Pustakanche Gaav’ or ‘Village of Books’, almost every house in this quaint hilly village has a library with about 1,000 books on a particular theme such as history, novel, short story, sports, among others. Large murals on the walls of the house depict the theme of the library it houses.

The libraries in the village, also known as India’s Hay-onwye, after the famous Welsh village in the UK known for its literary festival, is a project started by the Maharashtra government in 2017 with the objective of promoting Marathi literature. “We provide books, shelves, tables and chairs to set up libraries in the drawing rooms of these houses. The villagers do not charge us any rent and are welcoming hosts. We keep adding new books to the collection,” says Vinay Mavlankar, the project manager, whose office is located in the Bhilar village, which also organises gala cultural and literary programmes.

“Before Covid-19, we used to receive about 10 visitors a day. The library is part of our house, and so we get an opportunity to have long conversations with visitors about their lives, and literature, enhancing our understanding of other parts of the country and deepening our knowledge of books,” says Vaibhav Bhilare, whose house in the village is titled Kadambari-2, which is home to a library with Marathi novels.

Bhilar has inspired many villages across the country.

One of them is in Perumkulam, near Kollam, in Kerala. The villagers have put several sloped-roof, house-shaped glass bookshelves, with about 50 books each, across the village. Last year, well-known Malayalam writer MT Vasudevan Nair declared it a “village of books”.

In the neighbouring Tamil Nadu, in the past few years, Shiva Shankar, a former professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute and Asai Thambi Replong, English Literature professor at Pachaiyappa’s College, in Chennai, have been on a mission to set up libraries in Dalit villages across the state. So far, they have set up, 18 libraries in 15 districts, all of them with over 3,000 books.

“We wish to create equitable opportunities for rural children and students, and our primary focus are Dalits. We approach the villages and all we ask for is a room in a public or private space and volunteers to run the libraries after we set it up. We want to create at least 100 libraries. Libraries, we believe, are an effective tool of social inclusion and empowerment,” says Replong.

Agrees, Lal Bahar, the man who started the village library movement in western UP. “Libraries can be the key to the social, educational and cultural revival of villages,” he says. “Earlier, in our village when an elderly person saw a youngster loitering around, he would say, ‘what are you doing here, go home; now the elderly villager says, ‘do not waste your time, go to the library.”

Our mission is to open a library in every village of the country, and make Gautam Buddh Nagar the first district to have a library in every village