Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Sunday said the government should either call for a joint parliamentary committee probe into the Pegasus snooping allegations or request the Supreme Court to appoint a sitting judge to investigate the matter, and demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi make a statement in Parliament clarifying whether there had been surveillance or not.
The former home minister said he was not sure that one can go to the extent of saying that the entire electoral mandate of 2019 was vitiated by the “unlawful snooping” but added that it may have “helped” the BJP to score that victory which has been “tainted” by the allegations. Asked about Parliament IT panel head Shashi Tharoor’s remarks that the subject is already on the mandate of the committee and a JPC is not required, Chidambaram expressed doubts whether the IT panel with a majority of BJP members will allow full probe into the matter.
At the same time, he said he is not diminishing the role of the parliamentary committee to the extent it can probe the matter and is welcome to do so.
Posing questions for the government, he asked whether there was surveillance at all and whether snooping was done through Pegasus.
