Pegasus spyware scandal: Why were Indian health advocates targeted?

With targets ranging from prime ministers to presidents to high-ranking military officers, a global investigation into illegal cell phone infiltration and surveillance by governments using Pegasus, the Israeli spyware, has sent shock waves across the world. In India, where more than 1,000 phone numbers featured in a leaked list of potential targets of surveillance operations, a controversy erupted after the investigations revealed the list to include journalists and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political rivals. Also on the list are names of some of the country’s top-most public health advocates — from a top virologist to officials of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in India as well as country representatives of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. According to The Guardian, two CDC employees, virologist, and infectious disease expert Gagandeep Kang, two officials of the Gates Foundation, including M Hari Menon, the organization's India country head, and advocates working for anti-tobacco NGOs are featured on the list. The Wire, an Indian news website, said the list also includes at least two others from the health sector — the head of a nonprofit, and an unnamed individual connected to a state-run virus research lab. The Guardian and The Wire are two of the 17 media organizations that investigated the surveillance. Devex reached out to Kang but she chose not to respond. The Gates Foundation said it had no comment to make on the issue. India’s Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said that “no form of illegal surveillance” was “possible” due to the country’s systems, but has refused to clarify whether it has used the Pegasus software for surveillance. Media organizations reporting on the leaked database have said that the presence of the names on the list indicates an intention to intercept and infiltrate their devices but does not reveal whether there was an attempt made and if it was successful. However, it is this “intent” that is troubling and puzzling many within the country’s public health community. Experts such as Dr. Oommen John, a senior research fellow at The George Institute for Global Health, an independent global medical research institute, said that the allegations if proven, reflected deep insecurities over the assessment that public health advocates might make about the country’s health systems. “When a scientific expert or an institution yields significant influence, what they communicate becomes very critical to the image of the government,” Oommen said. More clout, less criticism Kang, the virologist, for instance, chairs the Immunization Technical Advisory Group for the South East Asian Region at the World Health Organization. She is also a member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and is the first Indian woman to be elected as a fellow to the Royal Society. But she has also been critical of public health policies, visibly so during the ongoing pandemic, when she has regularly criticized the government’s handling of the country’s vaccination campaign and even resigned from a top state-run research institute, days after criticizing the government’s plans to expedite approvals to a locally-developed vaccine. Such criticism might not always go down well with authorities, experts point out. “There has been a conscious push by the Modi government to set a larger agenda around the country’s health profile — be it through gaining posts at the WHO or even by announcing major health schemes, even if they are for optics,” a New Delhi-based public health expert told Devex, not wishing to be named citing the sensitivity of the issue. Modi’s pet schemes include at least two health-sector programs — the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, which his government has called the “world’s largest health assurance scheme” and the setting up of 150,000 “health and wellness centers” for primary care. “When a scientific expert or an institution yields significant influence, what they communicate becomes very critical to the image of the government.” --— Oommen John, senior research fellow, The George Institute for Global Health All this has come with global recognition for the country. In May last year, the country’s former health minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan was elected as executive board chair at WHO while the country’s former health secretary, Preeti Sudan, served as chair at WHO’s Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Many others, such as professor T Sundararaman, who has served as the executive director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre in New Delhi, said that the government’s move might also be aimed at its domestic political constituents. Sundararaman pointed to the tensions that have characterized the relationship between the Modi government and organizations such as the Gates Foundation — in 2017, the government scrapped the foundation’s funding of a public unit advising the government on its infant vaccination programs. The next year, the country’s central bank sacked the then country head of the foundation from its central board citing a conflict of interest. Much of this was driven by demands of Hindu nationalist affiliates of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, who have publicly questioned the role of the Gates Foundation and demanded inquiries into the foundation’s role in the country’s health policy. In 2019, the foundation awarded Modi a Global Gatekeeper Award for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, a sanitation program. Incidentally, the Pegasus project showed that Gates Foundation officials were added to the list of potential surveillance just around the time Modi got the award. Owing to these tenuous dynamics, organizations such as the Gates Foundation, the public health expert said, were never outspoken in their criticism of the government’s policies but instead, engage in “science diplomacy.” “The surveillance on the foundation’s officials must have been driven by the concerns that the BJP’s affiliates have raised,” Sundararaman said. He said that the possible surveillance on the CDC could be driven by similar suspicions. “For a long time now, successive Indian governments have harbored suspicions about the CDC’s role and hence, have been looking at its activities closely,” he said. Lasting repercussions Such suspicions have come to the fore repeatedly. Last year, the Indian government had said that the CDC was funding a research project on the Nipah virus without obtaining government approvals and ordered it to halt its funding. Local newspapers quoted government sources sharing their apprehensions of the CDC using the data to prepare a vaccine as well as create a biological-terror weapon of warfare. Interestingly, included in the leaked database are members of the CDC as well as the unnamed lab officials who were working on a similar collaborative study on the Nipah virus in 2018 when their numbers were added to the list, The Wire has found. The snooping allegations, however, cast a fresh shadow on the fate of such collaborative research projects. “Such allegations are a serious threat to the spirit of collaboration between countries and could disrupt collaborative research projects from happening in India,” Sundararaman said. Such disruption, coupled with the shrinking space for criticism of the country’s public policies, might not augur well for health research domestically, he added. “Even authorities who are sanctioning studies and research in India will get unduly conscious, knowing that the government is scrutinizing each step they take.”