An explosive investigative report in the Washington Post earlier this week has revealed that all of the main charges in the Indian government’s high-profile Bhima Koregaon case -- which alleges that a group of activists sought to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and incite violence against the state -- is based on false evidence that was planted in an extraordinary cyberattack.
According to the US-based digital forensics specialists Arsenal Consulting, as well as three independent experts engaged by the newspaper, unknown (and until now, untraceable) hackers infiltrated the computer of Rona Wilson, who founded the Committee for Release of Political Prisoners and has previously spent many years defending people who have been accused of terrorism.
The Post reported: “Arsenal discovered records of the malware logging Wilson’s keystrokes, passwords and browsing activity. It also recovered file system information showing the attacker creating the hidden folder to which at least 10 incriminating letters were delivered -- and then attempting to conceal those steps. The letters were created using a newer version of Microsoft Word that did not exist on Wilson’s computer, the report said. Arsenal found no evidence that the documents or the hidden folder were ever opened.”
Rather incredibly, the hack lasted for almost two years, with its perpetrators biding their time until their intended target needed to be compromised. Mark Spencer, the president of Arsenal, told The Post that this case was “unique and deeply disturbing,” as well as “very organized” and “extremely dark.”
At this juncture, no one can authoritatively determine who had both the motive and resources to criminally malign an assorted group of mainly elderly activists, who are all -- as the Post says -- “advocates for the rights of India’s most underprivileged communities, including tribal peoples and Dalits, formerly known as ‘untouchables.’”
What is clear, however, is this digital skulduggery isn’t isolated, but part of much broader patterns that have been playing out for years.
Just months ago, in June 2020, the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International, in co-ordination with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, uncovered another co-ordinated spyware campaign against individuals they described as “human rights defenders (HRDs)” who were calling for the release of Rona Wilson and the others accused of complicity in the Bhima Koregaon case.
Amnesty wrote, “Between January and October 2019, the HRDs were targeted with emails containing malicious links. If these links were clicked, a form of commercially-manufactured Windows spyware would have been deployed, compromising the target’s Windows computers, in order to monitor their actions and communications. This is a violation of their rights to freedom of expression and privacy.”
Even more worrisome was the finding that three of these individuals were targeted by Pegasus spyware -- made by the Herzliya-based cyberarms dealers NSO Group -- which can only be sold and exported with Israeli government approval to governments in good standing with Tel Aviv.
Those 2020 revelations are intimately linked to the Arsenal Consulting report that was released this week.
The Post reported that “The same attacker deployed some of the same servers and IP addresses to target Wilson’s co-defendants in the case over a period of four years.”
Amnesty says, “This pattern underscores the necessity of India fulfilling its obligation to provide a remedy for these abuses by conducting a full, independent, and impartial investigation into these attacks, including by determining whether there are links between this spyware campaign and specific government agencies.
“The alacrity of state prosecutors acting despite the lack of evidence is especially glaring in another case, that of Munawar Faruqui, the 29-year-old comedian who was peremptorily jailed this January for ‘deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings,’ which is the subject of another notable international news story this week.”
Sonia Faleiro writes in TIME that, “No matter what he did that night, Faruqui was going to be punished.”
To be sure, like all good comedians, Faruqui occasionally offends some people (in one notable case, he deleted a video and apologized for it). But this time he was charged and imprisoned even though he said and did nothing actionable.
Another comedian, Varun Grover, told Faleiro: “The system has so much power now that they can suppress you without any evidence. It doesn’t matter that [he] didn’t even cross any pre-existing red line -- they can create new arbitrary red lines on the ground and arrest you for your thoughts.”
Faruqui spent over a month in jail, in which time the Madhya Pradesh high court denied him bail thrice, until the Supreme Court intervened because, it said, due procedure had not been followed in his arrest and the allegations were anyway “vague.”
Now that we have all seen the Arsenal Consulting revelations about evidence-tampering, the question is what will the judges rule in the context of the much higher Bhima Koregaon stakes.
Vivek Menezes is a writer based in Goa, India.
