Pegasus: Diverting public money for politics has altered politics and national security

The Indian government or its authorized agencies had used the Pegasus spyware in the run-up to the 2019 General Elections is now in the realm of certainty, not probability. The Pegasus Project has revealed that the spyware was used for the surveillance of journalists, activists and politicians. But the disclosure could well be the tip of the iceberg. A lot may yet remain to be revealed.

While widespread use of surveillance was always suspected, what wasn’t clear earlier was the extent of this surveillance and the people who were targeted. Now that the list of potential targets of Pegasus and its true capabilities have been revealed by the international media initiative, two facts are clearer than ever.
First, the targets were political in nature and that people were spied upon for political purposes rather than combating terrorism or maintaining public order. Two, the military grade spyware is nothing short of a cyber weapon and gives the Pegasus user complete control over a device - including the possibility of remotely activating the device’s camera and microphone to spy on the targets.

Such surveillance capabilities were earlier available to only a handful of intelligence agencies in the world. But the capability is now being sold by commercial entities to governments around the world. As our book The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities: How Information Warfare Shapes Your World (HarperCollins, 2021), being released in the first week of August, explains, the source of power in the modern world is control over information.

Historically, power was derived from military might. Thereafter in the industrial age, power was determined by economic prowess. In today’s world, power is derived from the ability to control the “reality”. Whosoever defines reality by shaping the information environment essentially gets the power to control people’s thoughts, and that is the ultimate power. A large part of the information environment today comprises cyberspace, and as political competition within nations and competition among nations heats up, the war to dominate cyberspace is also heating up.

Tools like Pegasus are important weapons in the information warfare. They invest the government the ability to snoop on the opposition, critics and the media to get an advance idea of threats to it. It also allows the time to prepare the groundwork for their own alternate reality. The spyware also gives them material to coerce individuals into supporting their version of reality, not just because of the ability to blackmail people, but also because information is a major source of power in politics. Just knowing what others are strategizing or who the key players in any electoral strategy are gives one a tremendous advantage in controlling the outcomes.

The use of a spyware like Pegasus is the clearest indication that the government of India wouldn’t hesitate to use any means to consolidate power, and ethics or morality would not influence their decisions.

What is even more revealing is that intelligence agencies, autonomous institutions and investigative bodies entrusted with the task of regulating tools like Pegasus and ensure that it is utilized for the purpose of national security, have given up their autonomy. They have allowed the tool to be used for domestic surveillance for clearly political ends. This has major consequences for India’s democracy and national security.

This weakening of institutions and changed priorities for intelligence gathering can potentially create tremendous external vulnerabilities. As the state’s national security apparatus gets repurposed for politics, officials within these institutions come to accept that their career advancement is linked to benefiting those in power.

The attention shifts from external threats to domestic politics. The institutions instead of fulfilling their role of gathering intelligence on foreign adversaries or on critical military developments like the deployment of Chinese forces in Ladakh, refocused to collect domestic political intelligence. If we continue down this path, there are several major challenges that India will inevitably face in the coming years, some of which will prove to be existential challenges for the nation.

In its quest for absolute control over the nation’s political landscape, BJP has weakened institutions and this could well present a challenge even to the version of reality that it wants to perpetuate. Let us not forget that these same institutions are also responsible for maintaining the health of India’s economy, society and national security. Weakening these critical institutions inevitably weakens all these aspects too.

Even though the national security implications of the weakened institutions are causes of real concern both within the establishment and possibly even for the people at large, the institution that’s already been severely damaged is India’s democracy.

By establishing control over much of India’s media and investigative bodies and weaponizing them against the opposition, the BJP has ensured that its version of reality is the one that gets embedded in people’s minds, but it also means that the chances of the actual reality striking back with catastrophic results are equally high.

As the mismanagement of COVID during the second wave demonstrated, the government itself had bought into the myth of its great handling of the first wave and the greatness of its governance abilities, which left everybody ill prepared for the second wave. Even when the wave had struck, the government continued to reiterate its own version of reality, that there was abundant oxygen and no shortage of vaccines, leading to increased loss of life and misery for many citizens.

As the use of Pegasus, raids on opposition leaders, arrest of critics and other actions of this government clearly illustrate, the state machinery has already been repurposed to actively work against the opposition. This makes countering this government extremely difficult as nation’s politics no longer operate under the normal democratic norms or on a level playing field.

This actually removes the government’s incentives to work in the interests of citizens; on the other hand, it incentivizes the deployment of increasing resources into conjuring alternate realities.

Whether India can come back from such a realignment of all institutions to serve the sole purpose of perpetuating power for the ruling party will not only define and decide the future of this nation, but will also determine the ruling party’s ability and willingness to deliver on its original promise.

(Shivam Shankar Singh is the author of The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities (HarperCollins, 2021) and How to Win an Indian Election (Penguin, 2019)