NEW DELHI: Falling short of issuing any notice in several petitions with allegations of snooping through 'Pegasus' spyware, a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) N V Ramana and Justice Surya Kant said that if such allegation were true then it was a serious matter.  

“Before going into all that, we want to ask certain questions. No doubt the allegations are serious in nature if the reports in the newspapers are correct,” the CJI remarked during the hearing.

The bench was hearing a clutch of eight petitions (including one by senior journalists N Ram and Sashi Kumar) seeking an independent probe into the whole controversy.

Apart from others, the Editors Guild of India has sought in its plea that a special investigation team be set up to conduct a probe into the reported surveillance of journalists and others.

During the hearing, the apex court also wondered as to why no one including the petitioners seeking a probe into the Israeli spyware has made any efforts to file a criminal complaint on this matter even though the Pegasus issue surfaced in 2019?

"You know there are provisions under the Telegraph Act or the Information Technology Act to file criminal complaints," the bench said, "It appears, I do not know, nowhere it is stated whether they have made any efforts to file criminal complaints against any of them".

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who was appearing for senior journalists Ram and Kumar, said that the petitioners had no access to the information earlier and Pegasus spyware is sold only to the government and its agencies.

Sibal said that the Pegasus attack was only known now after the reports of the Citizen Lab, to which the bench said that the petitioners in the matter are educated and knowledgeable persons and they should have made efforts to put more material together.

Senior advocate C U Singh, appearing for some petitioners, said though the matter came to light in 2019, the names of persons targeted were not known till now.

Senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for activist Jagdeep Chhokkar who is allegedly a Pegasus target, told the bench the Governments of the USA and France have taken action on the basis of these reports and informed the Israeli government about it.

Advocate M L Sharma, who is one of the petitioners in the matter, also advanced arguments in the matter but was reprimanded by the bench saying that except newspaper cuttings, there was nothing substantial in his petition. The bench also took exception to the fact that he has arrayed Prime Minister as party individually and allowed him to amend the memo of parties.

The apex court asked the petitioners to serve the copies of the pleas to the centre so that somebody from the government is present before it on August 10 to accept the notice.