In the new revelations made by the Pegasus Project, The Wire revealed today that more than 25 people from the Kashmir Valley were selected as targets of surveillance from 2017-2019.
A number of political leaders, journalists and activists from Kashmir have made it to the list.
The Wire’s latest report claims that at least 2 members of the PDP Chief Mehbooba Mufti’s family were targeted.
It was around the time that Mufti happened to be the Chief Minister of the erstwhile state, with the PDP in coalition with the BJP.
The report claims that the former chief minister’s family members were chosen right before BJP decided to pull out of the coalition in June 2018.
The Wire said that Mufti had declined to comment when she was asked whether she thought that there was a link.
Although, Mufti did add that Surveillance was not a new concept to the Kashmiris.
“People are used to having their thoughts, ideas not only intercepted but even being punished for them,” she said.
The Pegasus Project is an initiative by a France based media organization, Forbidden Stories in collaboration with Amnesty International and seventeen media houses all across the globe, which investigate the leaked database of 50,000 telephone numbers to be under the threat of surveillance by the governments of the various countries.
The Wire has been covering Indian telephone numbers leaked in the database and has claimed that around 300 numbers linked with various journalists, opposition leaders, activists and academics have come to the fore which were potential targets of surveillance from 2017-2019.