Congress, Shiv Sena, DMK protest over snooping issue in Parliament premises

New Delhi : The Congress, Shiv Sena and the DMK on Friday staged a protest against the government over the alleged Pegasus project.Several MPs of the Congress, Shiv Sena and the DMK held the protest in front of the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Parliament premises.The MPs also raised slogans against the government.The protest was joined by former Congress President Rahul Gandhi, Congress MPs Mallikarjuna Kharge, K.C. Venugopal, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Shashi Tharoor, Shiv Sena RS MP Priyanka Chaturvedi and several others.The alleged snooping issue has triggered a stormy start to the Monsoon Session after a global collaborative investigative project revealed that Israeli company NSO Groups’ Pegasus spyware targeted over 300 mobile phone numbers in India including that of two ministers in the Narendra Modi government, three Opposition leaders, constitutional authority, several journalists and business persons.It snowballed on Tuesday after it came to fore that in July 2019, phone numbers of Karnataka’s then Deputy Chief Minister G. Parameshwara and the personal secretaries of then Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, were selected as possible targets for surveillance.The Congress on Monday accused the government of “treason” and held Shah responsible for the snooping and hacking of phones of journalists, judges and politicians, and demanded a probe.BJP leader and former IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad questioned the credentials of those behind the story as well as its timing, coming a day before Parliament’s Monsoon Session that began on Monday, as he accused the opposition party of hitting a “new low” in making baseless allegations.