Hopeful IT panel will take up Pegasus issue: Tharoor
■ Puts blame for logjam in Parliament on BJP
New Delhi, Aug. 8: Shashi Tharoor, senior Congress leader and chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT, on Sunday said the panel’s last meeting on July 28 was “disrupted” by BJP members as they did not want the Pegasusrelated allegations to be discussed and the officials who were to testify “appear to have been instructed not to attend”. He, however, expressed hope that the snooping issue would be taken up by the panel going forward.
Mr Tharoor also put the blame for the logjam in Parliament on BJP and accused the saffron party of reducing the “temple of democracy to a rubber stamp for its agenda or worse, a notice board to announce its unilateral decisions”.
In an interview with PTI, the Congress leader hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his remarks that the Opposition was insulting Parliament, saying 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”.
Avoiding discussion and accountability is the real insult to Parliament, said the former Union minister and Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
Asked going forward the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology will be able to take up the Pegasus snooping issue, Tharoor said for two years now the IT committee has 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.
The Pegasus issue, therefore, clearly falls under the purview of the IT committee and so it is only expected that its members will ask questions about it when these topics arise, he said.