Thread by @thewire_in

Hours after @narendramodi acted to oust Alok Verma from his post as head of CBI at midnight on October 23, 2018, an unidentified Indian agency known to be a user of #Pegasus made a note of 3 telephone numbers registered in his name. | @svaradarajan
#Replug
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan The blow the Modi govt gave that night was accompanied by a second sucker punch: someone with the keys to India's hush-hush spyware deployment system received authorisation to add Verma's numbers to a list of persons of interest selected for surveillance.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan .@thewire_in investigated several hundred India numbers from a leaked database comprising 50,000 numbers believed to be linked to probable targets of #Pegasus.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Along with Verma, the personal telephone numbers of his wife, daughter and son-in-law would eventually get placed on the list too, making it a total of 8 numbers from this one family.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan The midnight coup in the CBI came barely two days after Verma ordered the filing of a criminal case against Rakesh Asthana, then special director in the Bureau, accusing him of corruption.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Given Asthana's proximity to Modi, the case, registered on October 15, 2018 – which ironically depended on (lawful) phone intercepts and apparently yielded a lot of sensitive material – sent alarm bells ringing at the highest levels of the government.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan However, the case against the prime minister's blue-eyed boy was only one of the factors that had led to the government growing wary of the CBI chief.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Verma had courted official displeasure by apparently refusing to take action against individuals whom the establishment had political reasons to target.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Worse, he had not quickly rejected a request for a criminal probe into the controversial purchase of 36 Rafale aircraft from France – as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had assumed he would.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan On October 4, barely three weeks before Verma was terminated, eminent lawyer Prashant Bhushan and former Union minister Arun Shourie met Verma in his office to personally hand over the Rafale complaint.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan The government's unhappiness over this meeting was widely reported at the time.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan While Verma may not have begun the process of launching a preliminary enquiry into the Rafale matter, the fear in the PMO might have been that Asthana’s counter-attack could create a situation in which Verma might actually announce a probe into the deal.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Whatever the reasons for Verma's ouster, the political stakes were clearly high enough for the prime minister to risk the blowback that a high-profile dismissal would inevitably trigger.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan And the decision to add his numbers, and numbers of his family, to the list of probable targets was likely driven by the desire to gauge his legal strategy – and to determine whether he was going to leak information that the govt would find embarrassing.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan The fact that Verma was a possible target for surveillance using Pegasus during this period underscores the seriousness with which the highest echelons of the government regarded him as a threat.
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@narendramodi @svaradarajan Read @svaradarajan's full report here:
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