Prabir Purkayastha | SabrangIndia

How Do I Say Goodbye to a Comrade I Have Known For 50 Years?

sabrang — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 05:32:37 +0000

Comrade Sitaram was a student activist and leader in JNU, during and after the 1975 Emergency. I too was a student at JNU at the time. The iconic photo of his reading out the letter that JNU students wrote, asking Mrs. Gandhi to resign from the Chancellorship of JNU: the photo is being widely circulated at the moment. It has the Sitaram we still remember: slightly dishevelled, curly hair and a ready smile. It is this smile and his friendship towards all— even those with whom he had sharp political differences—that was his hallmark. First as a student leader, then as a leader of the party, and of the left and democratic forces in the country, Sitaram was able to build bridges and forge political alliances. He drew respect from even those with whom he disagreed. His departure is a heavy blow; and even more so because it comes at a time when we need large alliances that will resist ongoing attempts to change the very fabric of the nation that we have inherited from the freedom movement.

Yes, the nation we inherited was deeply flawed. It came out of our feudal past, which British colonialism preserved with all its inequalities, super-imposing the rapacious extraction of huge surpluses for its imperial project. While we charted our path as a nation to fight the colonial and ex-colonial powers, we had the goal of a secular and an egalitarian order. An order in which we would build an economy free from colonial extraction, and in which all citizens would be equal. This was the larger vision of the freedom movement which we all shared.

Our student days—Sitaram’s and mine—were not only built on fighting for the kind of education we should have; it was also a time of learning to feel and express solidarity with the peasants and the workers. We marched in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism, we expressed our views about the bloody coup in Chile that toppled Allende and brought in the brutal Pinochet regime. Students, and certainly JNU students, were very much a part of solidarity with the railway strike in the country; the textile workers in Delhi; protests against Kissinger’s visit just after the Pinochet coup; and, of course, solidarity with the struggle of the Vietnamese people. Sitaram’s three terms as JNUSU president covered the fag end of the year when the Emergency was finally lifted, and two elections he fought and won during the next year.

At the time our student days were coming to a close, the older generation of party leaders who came out of the freedom struggle decided that the party needed to build its future leadership. Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury were elevated to the Central Committee in 1984 in the 8th Party Congress, and later to the Politburo of the party. This move provided the vital link between the leaders who had come out of the freedom movement, and the new generation.

Com. Sitaram—to be more precise, our generation—faced challenges quite different from those faced by the leaders of the freedom movement, at both national and international levels. At the national level, the Congress, which had strong secular credentials and a vision of an independent, inclusive India, was taken over by the slogan of “liberalisation”. It moved away from the need to address the grinding poverty of its people that colonialism had left behind. The slogan we hear now—that the rich will pull up the poor, implying that the state’s task is to help the rich—was also articulated by many in the Congress arguing the need to “liberate the animal spirits” of the capitalists. Sitaram, with his strong foundation in economics, undertook the task of unmasking the true nature of the Indian “reforms” that were systematically selling the public sector and handing over the “commanding heights” of the economy to big capital. His various writings on the political economy of India, and his sharp critique of the path being embarked upon—the neoliberal order—provided the party’s activists with the necessary material for their campaigns.

At the international level, the weakening of the socialist countries also meant the increasing belief that the US Imperium—the new Rome—was here to stay, what Francis Fukuyama called the End of History! The Indian political class took to believing that the only way forward was to align with the US, while continuing to pay lip service to non-alignment and solidarity with the third world.

This headlong march towards a far more rapacious, capitalist India, aligning with global capital under the hegemony of the US, opened the way for the right, the BJP, who had, in their earlier avatar as the Jan Sangh, argued for aligning with the West. The BJP thought planning of the economy was dreaded socialism. That is why one of the first acts of the Modi Government was to do away with the Planning Commission. It argued that the economy should be handed over completely to the capitalist class, who know best. In other words, we should move to the open crony capitalism that we see today.

But if you cannot deliver benefits to the people, what can you do? Divert them by talking about an ancient glorious past which invaders destroyed. Rather than demanding their rights now, people should develop pride in alleged past glories. Instead of fighting for their rights, they should fight fellow citizens who are brushed with the taint of the “enemy”. Instead of an inclusive India, the objective is to dismantle the nation built on the basis of the secular India that the Constitution envisions. This is the BJP strategy.

Again, Com. Sitaram was very much the glue that held together the various disparate forces that opposed the BJP’s divisive project. His ability to talk to different sections, breaking across political, social and even linguistic lines made him indispensable to the larger struggle to preserve the secular and inclusive nation that was the objective of the national movement. Without his untiring work, his selfless task of putting the country and its future before all else, the unity that we have seen unfolding, and the resulting dents in the BJP in the recent elections, would not have happened. Yes, his task is not finished. But he has left us a clear view of the direction to take. To do this, Com. Sitaram “spent” his life instead of “saving” it. He spent his life working for a world free from oppression; and that is the generous legacy he has left all of us who share his vision of continued struggle and solidarity. To quote Galaeno, the famous Latin American writer and activist, “Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away…As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.” That is our lesson from Comrade Sitaram’s struggle. This is the utopian legacy we all share with Sitaram.

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post How Do I Say Goodbye to a Comrade I Have Known For 50 Years? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

What is Ravishankar Prasad Hiding on WhatsApp Hack?

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 12:58:44 +0000

This is what political parties and others are asking: was it a government agency that bought the hacking tools from the Israeli company? And used it against its own citizens? Are we, as Justice Srikrishna said, becoming an Orwellian surveillance state? Justice Srikrishna headed the committee that gave detailed recommendations on framing a data and privacy protection law. Though its recommendations were submitted in 2018, the government has been dragging its feet over such a law protecting the privacy of its citizens.

If we listen to Ravi Shankar Prasad, the IT minister, it is either the fault of the Congress, who used to bug their opponents phones; or Facebook’s: he has asked WhatsApp to “explain” the hacks. In other words, deflect from the simple and straight forward question, did any central government agency buy or license Pegasus from the Israeli company?

Under the rules of the IT Act, ten central government agencies were notified in 2018, who have powers of interception. The home ministry’s denial on an RTI on whether Pegasus was procured by the government, was limited only to agencies under the home ministry. What about agencies such as NTRO, RAW and CBI, which are not under the home ministry? Why has the voluble Ravi Shankar Prasad, otherwise offering his opinion on everything under the sun, been so coy about providing a straight answer to this question?

The CPI(M) in a press statement raised questions, “The government needs to answer whether any of its agencies were involved in the use of this hacking software, particularly since most of the persons affected were targeted by the government in May last year. Under law, hacking peoples phones would constitute a cyber crime. If the government is not involved in the Pegasus software as it claims, why has it not filed an FIR and started criminal investigations?”

NSO, the Israeli company has claimed that they supply such software only to government agencies. If indeed the Indian government agencies are not involved, then the hacking of peoples smartphones constitute a criminal offence. Why has the government, specifically the IT ministry not filed an FIR and started criminal investigations on this? Blaming the Congress for previous misdeeds including the Emergency, does not absolve this government from performing its constitutional duties. Or is it the IT minister’s kindergarten alibi that “they did first”?

NSO has been notorious for supplying its hacking tools to governments and various spy agencies. Among its buyers have been Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, who have used these tools to hack into their critics phones and computers. It was widely reported that Jamal Khashoggi’s iPhone was hacked by Saudi intelligence agencies using Pegasus, prior to his killing in Saudi’s Istanbul consulate.

The only legal step that has been taken in this hacking is Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp platform, filing a civil suit for damages against two Israeli entities, NSO and Q Cyber Technologies, in a Federal Court in San Francisco, US.

What is Pegasus “software” and how does it affect the smartphone users, particularly WhatsApp users? The Israeli company supplies hacking tools for various kinds of devices including Android based smartphones or iPhones, who between them have a near 100 per cent monopoly (or duopoly) over all smartphones. For WhatsApp, which has been widely publicising its 100 per cent end-to-end encryption, it is particularly embarrassing, as it has neglected to tell its users that such encryption does not help if the users’ phones are hacked; such information is available in unencrypted form on the users’ phones. To compound their embarrassment, the Pegasus hacking software used a security hole in the WhatsApp software.

The current security hole has been patched by WhatsApp. But this was only one such hole. There are many others which are not even known. These are called zero-day exploits – meaning that they are unknown to the supplier of such software – and are sold by criminals on the Dark Net. Even companies pay big money to hackers to learn about their security holes, quite often buying such information from the same Dark Net that criminals use.

If this buying and selling of such software are limited to only criminals or companies intent on patching their systems against vulnerabilities, the problems would have been far less than what we face today. This has been made far worse due to government’s intelligence agencies entry into this business. They bring in big bucks, large teams and tap into the leading research institutions in the name of national security.

While the US and the western media has been talking about Russia and China, they are largely silent on Israeli agencies and of course US agencies NSA-CIA, and UK’s GCHQ. These three sets of intelligence agencies have developed the most extensive suit of software tools or attack tools for penetrating computers, smartphones, the switches and routers that are a part of the telecom infrastructure of every country and even in our homes.

In this sense, hacking tools and cyber weapons are not significantly different, only their purpose is different. If anybody hacks into a computer or a phone, the hacker – and not the consumer – effectively owns the phone as they can control what the device does.

In the US, its domestic laws, permissive as they are under their so-called global war on terror, still has a modicum of protection on domestic surveillance; even under the FISA courts’ very wide latitude given to the security agencies. We know from Snowden and WikiLeaks revelations that the US had penetrated the telecom infrastructure of every country, and had backdoors to US manufactured equipment and software platform for installing its spyware.

The Israeli agencies worked closely with the US agencies. The US could not sell such software or equipment to “friendly” monarchies and fascist rulers as it comes under export control rules. In US, these software are recognised as weapons, and their exports are strictly controlled. No such controls exist for the Israelis, who use a number of companies that are very closely tied to the Israeli military and its spy agencies. NSO and other such companies are essentially the US-Israeli arm of supplying such software tools to other spy agencies of “friendly” governments.

Such sale of software tools to the government of other countries also provide the US and Israel additional intelligence feeds. The countries including India may feel that they have “bought” this software, but all such software operates based on “servers” set up by such companies, which again are linked to Israel. All this information goes back to Israel and the US spy agencies. When governments buy such software from foreign sources, they in effect, are partnering foreign agencies to spy on their own citizens; or help foreign powers shape the domestic narrative. If NTRO or RAW have indeed bought Pegasus, the narrative that such hacking can produce, can be easily manipulated by Israeli or US spy agencies. This is the risk of “outsourcing” intelligence operations and tools.

According to a Reuters report on the victims of the WhatsApp Pegasus breach, … “a ‘significant’ portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. If the NSO’s claims of selling only to governments are correct, either the Pegasus spyware was used by governments to hack each other, or they were victims of Israeli spying. To compound the danger, the NSA’s and CIA’s spyware tools were dumped by hackers on the net in 2017 and are available to criminals. This shows how dangerous such software is for everybody, not just activists.

What make such tools particularly dangerous is that they are not the work of a few hackers but have the resources of a state behind them. These are not hacking tools but cyber weapons. This is why the governments need to sign a moratorium on developing and deploying such weapons, the same as we have on chemical and biological weapons.

First published in https://peoplesdemocracy.in/

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Are the Yeddy Diaries Forged?

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 05:50:35 +0000

Prabir Purakayastha discusses with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta about the veracity of the diary entries showing payoffs to the top brass of BJP by Yeddyurappa.

The diary entries made by former Karnataka CM Yeddyurappa show Rs 1,800 crore payoffs to central BJP, and Jaitley, Gadkari, Rajnath, Advani and MM Joshi. Do the diaries disclose real payments made to the top brass of the Bharatiya Janata Party? Newsclick’s editor in chief Prabir Purakayastha in discussion with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

Courtesy: News Click

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