“We will be writing to the state home minister about the act done by the then-home minister (Shah)....and at whose instance he has done it” 

Agencies/New Delhi

India’s top women’s rights body said yesterday it would investigate allegations that a former close confidant of Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi had ordered police illegally to spy on a woman.

The National Commission of Women (NCW) said it would take up claims by media that Gujarat’s former minister of state for home Amit Shah ordered police to conduct surveillance on the woman in 2009.

“We will be writing to the state home minister about the act done by the then-home minister (Shah)....and at whose instance he has done it,” Nirmala Samant Prabhavalkar, a member of the government-funded NCW, told reporters.

She said the state government must answer “under what authority” it used “this kind of interception” on the woman.

Three units of the Gujarat police allegedly used their powers to tail the woman as she visited shopping malls, the gym and even her ailing mother in hospital in a weeks-long investigation, according to two online news portals.

The portals said they have obtained recordings of 267 phone conversations between Shah and a police officer who has handed the recordings over to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

“Given the scale and intensity of the surveillance mounted on her, the whole operation comes across as not just a snooping but a stalking enterprise driven by personal agenda,” the Mint newspaper said yesterday.

The ruling Congress Party has demanded a wider probe into the issue. The BJP has dismissed the allegations as a smear campaign against Modi, who is leading in opinion polls before the elections.

The BJP also continued to defend the incident, saying the woman’s father requested the government to spy on his daughter.

“The girl about whom we are talking, her father wrote a letter and made everything public... there is nothing left for us to say,” BJP chief Rajnath Singh said.

According to reports, the woman’s father wrote to the NCW saying his daughter, an “architect and educated woman is married and deeply perturbed by the intrusion upon her personal life and privacy.”

BJP leader Arun Jaitley toed his party line, saying a probe was not needed.

“When the girl and her father have demanded security for whatever specified reasons, then I see no reason for a probe,” Jaitley said.

However, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury slammed the BJP, and said snooping was not providing security.

“All these allegations are related to intrusion of privacy which is related to fundamental rights. The argument that the girl’s father said so is untenable,” Yechury said.

“The girl is an adult, an adult is an independent individual who enjoys all rights given by constitution. Such snooping is very fundamental intrusion in privacy of an individual,” he said.

Meanwhile, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid held out the spectre of an Orwellian society of totalitarian control creeping into India, an allusion to the snooping row.

“Is this the country we live in? Is this the kind of country we want to live in where government agencies are chasing you around, monitoring calls,” Khurshid said.

“It is very easy to find out what people are doing, we’re an open society. We should put restrictions on ourselves to ensure that that we don’t interfere in the lives of ordinary people, private citizens that do not affect national security,” Khurshid said.

“It should only be done in cases of paramount national importance,” he added.

On the letter the father of the woman wrote to the NCW, Khurshid said the individual’s rights were paramount in such situations.

“As far as snooping, stalking is concerned, I’m sorry, the father, the brother, the sister or the mother has no right. The individual is individual first and then comes the family,” the minister said.