On 3rd January (Wednesday), the Supreme Court refused to order an SIT probe on the allegations made by short-selling firm Hindenburg Research against the Adani group. The Supreme Court in its order noted that third-party reports, without any verification, cannot be relied on as proof. The court observed that such reports can be treated as inputs but not conclusive evidence to doubt Indian authorities, in this case, it was the market regulator SEBI.
The opposition’s major ploy to corner the Adani group – and through him Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the so-called supporter of crony capitalists — based on reports of foreign entities – Hindenburg and OCCRP has fallen flat. The Supreme Court order also alludes to the fact that it was all bunkum from the outset as extensively reported and explained by OpIndia.
Conspicuously, this was yet another bogus issue that the opposition bloc had deployed to halt the proceedings of the parliament and leave the legislature paralysed. Over the years, there has been a striking pattern about opposition’s conduct.
First, a dubious or mystical foreign entity para drops a report/content that makes unsubstantiated allegations days or a week ahead of the Parliament session.
Despite the time zone difference, the foreign ‘media’ reports get amplified in the blink of an eye, overshadowing every real story of public concern for hours, days, and weeks at times.
The bombardment of unsubstantiated allegations at the crucial juncture of the beginning of a new Parliamentary session then gets reinforced by the opposition by pulling the safety and emergency lever of Parliament, the ‘Adjournment motion’.
As the old adage goes, ‘while the truth begins to pull its socks, lie has already traveled around the world’. Despite being unsubstantiated and in most cases, the Joseph Gobbel-esque hitjob reports, it gives fodder to the opposition to buttress their cliched and baseless tropes – “Free Speech, Democracy, and Idea of India” getting “strangulated” and “the corrupt government is selling out the country to crony capitalist”, which can’t be further from the truth. With the opposition taking extreme measures and creating an unhinged ruckus, the Parliamentary proceedings and entire sessions get washed away in the pit of baseless foreign media reports.
Here are five major examples to back this glaring pattern of how the opposition uses baseless issues to stall legislative work and has been repeating it for years. But these same issues couldn’t stand the basic scrutiny of law when it reached the apex court. These bogus issues strategically timed and planted by foreign entities were bereft of merit. However, they did prove to be a successful tool to disrupt the Parliament and create a legislative impasse.
Hindenburg Research Report: Hitjob on Adani Group days ahead of Budget Session 2023
The Hindenburg Research, a short-selling firm, published a report, on 24th January 2023, accusing the Adani Group of fraud and stock price manipulation. The report came days ahead of the 2023 Budget Session of the Parliament which began on 31st January.
Following the publication of the report, the Adani Group trashed the Hindenburg Research report as a ‘malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations’. However, the Hindenburg report eroded Rs 46,000 crores in Adani group’s market capitalisation.
The opposition disrupted the parliamentary proceedings and brought an Adjournment motion, as pointed out and explained earlier. They created a ruckus throughout the session demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Adani-Hindenburg controversy, impeding the normal legislative functioning of the Parliament.
Primarily based on foreign media reports, the opposition bloc, particularly Rahul Gandhi, has been leading the charge against the Adani group arguing that from pin to pen, from electricity to farm, a penny spent on anything is going into Adani’s account.
From Parliament to any election rally in any part of the country irrespective of local issues, the Gandhi scion repeated the allegations against Gautam Adani like a stuck gramophone, although goofing up here and there about the quantum of the alleged scam varying from Rs 20,000 to Rs 20,000 crores to Rs 32,000 crore. Now what warrants him to come up with these numbers – dubious reports, often from mysterious foreign entities, and depth of merit in the allegations is “trust me, bro”, which over the course of time doesn’t get any corroboration.
The opposition’s allegations — derived from the unsubstantiated reports by a third-party organisation that has a well-established vested interest in the matter at hand and is based outside India – fall flat before the Supreme Court.
Rejecting the petitioner’s demand to conduct the SIT probe, the Supreme Court, on 3rd January 2024, noted that third-party reports without any verification cannot be relied on as proof. It observed that such reports can be treated as inputs but not conclusive evidence.
The opposition, rather than doing the hard yard itself to raise issues of public concern, went ahead callously with dubious reports of Hindenburg and OCCRP to beat the dead horse and ended up impeding important parliamentary work. Meanwhile, as stated above, despite the allegations being baseless, the short-selling firm Hindenburg and its ilks ended up benefiting from the controversy, an intended outcome for these firms that was always written on the wall.
Pegasus snooping allegation aired just a day before 2021 Monsoon session
On 18th July 2021, the left-wing portal ‘The Wire’ claimed that the names of 40 Indian journalists were present in a list that contained names of people who were spied upon using Israeli spyware Pegasus. The 40 Indians were apparently among the thousands of people mentioned in the so-called leaked list, which was earlier reported by The Guardian.
The pegasus snooping allegations were made a day before the 2021 Monsoon session of Parliament which began on 19th July. The opposition created a hue and cry hurling accusations left, right, and centre, and rendered both the houses of Parliament virtually dysfunctional with its pandemonium.
Why the ‘Pegasus snooping’ allegation was all bluff and bluster, no substance
Pegasus, a software that can infect iOS and Android devices remotely was developed by Israeli cyber arms firm NSO Group, and reportedly it is only sold to governments.
The Wire report insinuated that as only governments could use the software, it meant that the Modi govt was spying on Indian journalists including Siddharth Varadarajan, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, M.K. Venu, Shishir Gupta, Rohini Singh, etc. The report included quotes from the allegedly targeted journalists who directly blamed the Modi government for ‘spying’ on them.
The government clarified both in RTI replies and in the Parliament that there had been no unauthorised interception by security agencies.
The NSO group had also refuted the claims by the Guardian report about the ‘leak’. Days later, Amnesty International stated in a statement that they had never claimed that the so-called list was that of people who were spied on, and asserted that their ‘list’ was merely a mention of people who may be “potential targets” of the clients of NSO.
It is important to note that the opposition picked the baseless issue which was dead on arrival.
The opposition has flogged this dead horse ever since without caring for the fact that this was yet another issue para-dropped to mar Parliamentary functioning and had its origin in dubious foreign sources.
Notably, the Wire and its partners were fed the information by two very dubious organisations – one was Amnesty International and the other was Forbidden Stories, click here, to read in detail about the report and these organisations’ controversial track records.
The vindication of the fact that there was no merit in the Pegasus snooping story and that it was all bunkum is that the Supreme Court on 25th August 2022, said that no conclusive proof had emerged to support the claim that the Indian govt was using the Pegasus spyware to snoop on people.
Rafale – The elaborate plan that set the tone for this pattern
The recurrent reports by dubious French portals like Media Part are another prominent example of how the baseless issue raised by the opposition subsumed the parliamentary proceedings and left Parliament, the decision-making body for the country, ineffective. Media part published unsubstantiated reports on multiple occasions, including in April, July, and November 2021.
The opposition created a ruckus demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe against the Rafale deal which is an inter-governmental deal between the governments of India and France for 36 Rafale fighter jets in flyaway condition. The opposition hampered the functioning of the Parliamentary sessions in 2021 with the dubious media organisation fanning falsehoods within a fortnight gap with that year’s Parliamentary sessions.
Additionally, the NGO that filed a complaint against Rafale Deal is partners with George Soros’ Open Society, Misereor, and Oxfam among others.
Congress-friendly career PILists like Prashant Bhushan and others filed a PIL in the Supreme Court and asked the SC to intervene and order a court-monitored probe into the deal. Click here, to read How N Ram of The Hindu manufactured the Rafale scam through digitally cropped documents.
The changing numbers of the “scam” amount, the fact that Rahul Gandhi’s allegation of the amount “Modi gave to Ambani” was greater than the entire offset amount, the shoddy audio tape that was thrown out by the parliament, the fact that the Supreme Court itself gave a clean chit to the deal, and the fact that Rahul admitted that the Supreme Court had made no observation of ‘chowkidar chor hai’ as he had alleged, are all facts that have been put forth a number of times. Rahul Gandhi was eventually forced to apologise.
The opposition took voters and Parliament for a ride crying hoarse based on baseless allegations as vindicated by the SC verdict on the Rafale deal which dismissed petitions for inquiry. The court also later dismissed review petitions in this matter.
BBC documentary on PM Modi
The BBC released a propaganda documentary about PM Modi’s role during the 2002 Gujarat riots citing claims that were already termed as lies by courts in India including the Supreme Court of India. The BBC documentary ignored multiple court orders to push its agenda and was immediately banned by the Government of India.
The propaganda documentary was aired on 17th January 2023, just days ahead of the 2023 Budget session which began on 31st January.
The opposition created a ruckus and disrupted Parliament proceedings while raising the issue of the government banning the BBC documentary on PM Modi. The issue, however, got coupled with the Adani-Hindenburg row and the 2023 Budget session took a huge hit.
The opposition faced another humiliation and didn’t get relief from the Supreme Court in this matter and the ban was not lifted. Yet, the opposition parties and its ecosystem spent their energy screening the propaganda documentary by a foreign entity that challenged the sovereignty of Indian courts.
Apple threat notification fiasco dropped just before the 2023 Winter Session
On 31st October 2023, some iPhone-using Opposition leaders claimed that they received mysterious “threat alerts” from Apple. “ALERT: State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” the threat notification sent on iMessage and Apple Mail read.
It was quickly turned into a political outrage and the opposition blamed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for trying a so-called cyber attack on their Apple devices, including iPhones. It lead to a hue and cry to rekindle the dead hoarse – Pegasus snooping 2.0.
However, the ecosystem failed to drag the issue when things started to unravel and the issue died a premature death before the 2023 Winter Session could begin on 4th December.
Notably, Apple itself on its website stated that the so-called “state-sponsored threats” to their users’ devices are not reliable. Additionally, It came to light that the security threat messages were from a dubious Soros-linked NGO named Access Now, based out of India.
Conclusion
The opposition has failed to smell the coffee that their baseless allegations only get traction, praise, and amplification from its echo chamber of sycophants. These people have entrenched themselves deep in the digital world, and getting more likes is winning for them and a success/vindication of their allegations.
Click here, to read how the grand old party has been rejoicing in rehashing the same allegations with caricatures like MODANI, etc on key issues on which it had invested all its political capital rather than adding depth of merit to their case.
It is important to note that in all these baseless issues lies one underlying thing – to target the incorruptible image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ironically, Rahul Gandhi had once admitted in an interview that his “persistent” efforts would be to destroy PM Modi’s image. He argued that he learned that PM Modi’s greatest strength is his incorruptible image and replied, “Okay, I’m going to rip that strength to pieces. I am going to take it and shred it”.
The least Indian voters can expect from the opposition is to exercise Atmanirbharta in picking and setting the agenda/narrative and rooting their claims, allegations from Indian sources, doing the hard mile on their own. Rather than outsourcing their job of finding issues to corner the ruling dispensation to dubious foreign entities, which by the way are doing a shoddy job, and making blatant, defamatory, and unsubstantiated allegations on their ‘opponents’. While they get away with it unharmed for their attempt to manipulate Indian democratic discourse, it leaves the grand old party, its alliance partners, and the ecosystem humiliated when the litany of lies and propaganda comes crashing down on its weight.