Democracy and Spyware: The Case of India

Abstract

There is troubling contradiction between India's status as the world's largest democracy, with a constitution that enshrines privacy as a fundamental right, and the government's routine engagement in invasive digital surveillance of its own citizens. The Pegasus spyware revelations exposed how Indian authorities exploit systemic flaws, legal loopholes, and lack of oversight to illegally spy on dissidents, journalists, opposition figures, and activists, disregarding constitutional guarantees. This study uses the Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD) method to compare India's surveillance regime with the European Union's GDPR plus associated frameworks. This comparison aims to find the reasons for differing surveillance practices between the two, despite similar legal and constitutional protections. This analysis will examine five key variables: constitution, laws, policies/regulations, diversity of population, and security. This analysis focuses on weaknesses in India's laws that enable government overreach, focusing on the insufficient oversight and highlighting the need for reforms to adjust surveillance practices with democratic norms. This study which examines the important discrepancy between India's strong privacy rights as outlined in law and its largely unregulated surveillance powers, highlights the urgent need for thorough reforms. These reforms are necessary to limit surveillance powers, to firmly enshrine due process, and to enable independent oversight. A comparative analysis between India and the EU aims to better understand the reasons and factors leading to the misuse of surveillance powers in India, and to also lead towards potential solutions to better safeguard citizens' rights in the digital age. This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion about how democracies manage the challenges caused by these modern surveillance technologies and how democracies do this while still upholding and protecting both the rule of law and individual privacy rights.