There are two reasons India’s Congress Party-led government’s has been so silent about the NSA’s illegal spying on India, including on its own communications. It fears that any public conflict with US over the issue will hamper New Delhi’s burgeoning “strategic partnership” with Washington. India’s elite views close relations with Washington as critical to realizing its great power ambitions. And the crisis now roiling the Indian economy—growth has fallen by more than half over the past two years—has made New Delhi even more desperate for increased US investment. New Delhi’s other concern is that any official exposure and denunciation of US spying operations against India could call attention to its own massive domestic surveillance program, the so-called Central Monitoring System (CMS). Created without parliamentary approval and developed over the past five years, the CMS gives India’s security agencies unchecked access to the country’s 900 million landline and mobile telephone users and 120 million internet users. They can listen or record any communication nationwide and track communications of targeted individuals. In an October 30 editorial, the New Indian Express, a right-wing daily that is an enthusiastic proponent of closer strategic-military ties between New Delhi and Washington, nonetheless criticized the Indian government’s failure to complain about the NSA’s surveillance of its activities. This failure, it argued, only draws attention to India’s weakness: “It is time the UPA government realised silence on an issue that affects our sovereignty is bad diplomacy as it undermines the country’s prestige and can encourage both the US and other nations to treat us casually. It also sends a message of our weakness to our unfriendly neighbours, China and Pakistan.”
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 01:23:38 +0000
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