P Chidambaram denies phone-tapping charge

The government denied that it had ordered secret tapping on the phones of certain politicians even as the opposition paralysed parliament on the issue.

Home minister P Chidambaram said that preliminary inquiries have discovered nothing on phone-tapping, as reported in Outlook magazine.

But, he admitted that an inquiry to check the veracity of the report was still on. The magazine had claimed that sophisticated equipment meant to track terrorist groups had been used to intercept and record phone conversations of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Congress leader Digvijay Singh, CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.

“I wish to state that no telephone tapping or eavesdropping on political leaders was authorised by either the UPA-I or II,” Chidambaram said.

The minister read out the statement in Lok Sabha after the opposition demanded a clarification on the issue from prime minister Manmohan Singh. The phone-tapping was allegedly carried out for the past three years by the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), an intelligence agency created after the Kargil conflict with Pakistan in 1999, the magazine said.

The home minister defended the intelligence agencies, saying they function within the law. “They are fully accountable to the government under the Telegraph Act and the Information Technology Act and each case of monitoring of telephone or electronic communications has to be approved by the home secretary,” he said.

Chidambaram indicated that the probe into the phone-tapping controversy was still on. “If any evidence is found, the matter will be thoroughly investigated,” he said.