Civil/Criminal Jurisdiction Writ Petition No. 314 of 2021
Akarsh Khare, IMS Unison University
On “27th October, 2021” The Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana, Justice Surya Kant, and Justice Hima Kohli issued an order forming an expert committee to investigate the allegations of Pegasus spyware use. The charge that the government snooped on its own people and institutions in collaboration with a foreign company is serious. As the court stated in its order, the constitutional and democratic concerns at stake in the case must not be lost in the political quagmire. Around 50,000 devices were allegedly snooped on around the world. Victims of the surveillance included people working in a variety of fields.
Following the verdict of Justice K.S Puttaswamy (2017), many cases before the Supreme Court asserted privacy rights. However, in the case of Manohar Lal Sharma v. Union of India, the right to privacy is manifested in multiple forms in the personal and public lives of the citizens. The very legitimacy of a regime that harshly used nationalism and patriotism to imprison citizens is now clearly under scrutiny by the courts. At a time when the country's opposition is facing an existential crisis, the court, with all its limitations, asked some inconvenient and difficult questions.
