By IANS,
New Delhi : Veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani Sunday said a parliamentary committee was required to look into all aspects of the phone tapping issue and suggest a new legislation that forbids invasion of an ordinary citizen’s privacy.
Advani said in the latest post ‘Is the Emergency Back?’ on his blog that a parliamentary committee was needed “to examine all aspects of the problem, scrap the outdated Indian Telephone Act of 1885 and replace it by a new legislation which forbids invasion of an ordinary citizen’s privacy”.
He added that the new legislation should “formally recognize the right of the state to use the latest IT devices of interception to deal only with crime, subversion and espionage.”
“The law must provide statutory safeguards which make it impossible for the government to abuse its powers against political activists and pressmen,” he said.
The phone tapping controversy started after a report in newsmagazine Outlook said the government had tapped the telephones of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader Prakash Karat and Congress leader Digvijay Singh.
“In many democracies of the world the legitimacy and limits of phone tapping has been a matter of continuing debate. In the United States, this issue became subject matter of bitter acrimony during the Watergate days. Angry public opinion and the threat of impeachment led to Richard Nixon’s ouster from office,” Advani said.
He said there was no law governing wire-tapping in Britain but several parliamentary committees have gone into the question in depth.
Citing the example of the Birkett committee set up in 1957, he said it “described wire-tapping, or for that matter all forms of intercepting private communications, as ‘inherently objectionable’, but felt that the practice may be permitted within certain clearly defined areas, and with appropriate safeguards.”
He said it laid down that wire-tapping might be allowed to the police and security agencies only for the purpose of crime investigation or to check subversive or espionage activity – but with rigorous guidelines.
Reacting to the magazine report, the BJP Saturday accused the Congress of going back to the Emergency days.