By Aditya Aamir
So, if it was not a fake encounter, then it was a genuine encounter. Or, maybe, Sohrabuddin, Tulsi Prajapati and Kauser Bi just upped and set up an encounter with the police and were shot to ribbons. The CBI court, hearing the case, acquitted the last remaining 22 accused and washed its hands off the mess created by investigating agencies involved. But that is not what the CBI Court judge should be worried about. The Modi government most probably knew of the exact wordings of the verdict to come considering that his computer most probably was being snooped upon!
This nondescript PC on which this report is being written, the words popping up crab-like this very minute (1 pm sharp, December 21, 2018), is being monitored, intercepted and decrypted by the CBI, IB, Narcotics Control, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Commissioner of Delhi Police, Enforcement Directorate and other government agencies. While it gives a certain pomp to know that ‘Boy! Am I not somebody VIP to be spied upon?’ it also gives the creeps that somebody is reading what has just been written.
Every citizen’s computer is under surveillance. Courtesy an executive order of the home ministry. Phone tapping powers were already with the investigating agencies. With this executive order the rule of law has the power to invade, breach and appropriate “data” that is yours alone stored in your computer and if it is construed as remotely anti-national, then Man, you’re dead meat, liable to be put out to dry in a dungeon dug deep enough to bury you for good with not even recourse to a personal computer to watch porn!
The cliché ‘Orwellian’ is out along with George Orwell, who is dead and gone, but before he left Orwell gave us the ominous warning ‘Watch it, Big Brother is Watching’ in his book 1984. And four to five months short of general elections 2019, it is truly become ‘Ghar-Ghar Modi’, classic Orwellian! The order of the Ministry of Home’s cyber and information security wing is signed by the Home Secretary authorizes the 10 agencies to invade any and every computer. Computer sales will take a hit! Should Google, Facebook and Twitter bother?
Should the courts be concerned? Surely, CJI Ranjan Gogoi and fellow justices must have personal ‘personal computers’ as well as computers in office and those should also be in the ambit of the MHA’s executive order. And it was the Supreme Court which had earlier this year asserted that “privacy” was a fundamental right, repeat fundamental right, of every citizen in the realm and nobody, repeat nobody, will be allowed to play with it. So, what is the Centre playing at, why is it bent upon knowing the bent of mind of the electorate?
Most likely it has to do with GE 2019. That is the verdict on everybody’s lips and you don’t need 92 hostile witnesses to quash the thought. The executive order is not a fake encounter, it is genuine even if patently illegal. The ‘we the people, for the people, by the people’ government cannot snoop on ‘we the people’ to win another election by spying on people’s bent of mind. This is Cambridge Analytica copied in a ham-handed manner. Poor sods playing pure gods and coming cropper at that in less than 24 hours!
Mark Zuckerberg should be laughing except that he himself is in deep trouble, being hauled over the coals once again with further revelations on Cambridge Analytica hitting the fan overnight. Remember the time Modi hugged Mark? Those were early days for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and now he faces another seminal elections, momentous, creeping upon him inexorably, unstoppable, a moment of reckoning – will or will he not get a second term? If the writing is on the wall, it should reflect on the PC monitor!
Seems like the results of the 5-state elections were more than warning of things to come. It is not just Naseeruddin Shah who is in panic mode, worried where to hang his underwear; the Modi government and the BJP are also in panic and there is no panic room to duck into except to climb on to bridge and jump off the top deck before Titanic hits the iceberg. Icy cold the waters will be and frozen death but better a suicide than to be slaughtered like a cow! Big Brother is bothered his days are numbered. (IPA Service)