Surveillance, and where the tools come from

Pegasus in Kashmir

Pegasus is spyware made by the NSO Group, an Israeli company whose exports are licensed by Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Once installed on a phone it gives an operator the messages, the camera, the microphone and the location. NSO says it sells only to vetted government clients.

In July 2021 the Pegasus Project — a consortium coordinated by Forbidden Stories with the technical work done by Amnesty International’s Security Lab — reported on a leaked list of roughly 50,000 numbers selected as of interest to NSO’s government clients. More than 1,000 of them were Indian.^[1]

What forensic examination actually confirmed

This distinction matters and this site holds to it: appearing on the leaked list shows a client selected a number. It does not by itself prove the phone was infected. Infection has to be established by examining the device. Amnesty International’s Security Lab did that in two Kashmir-related cases, and the results are the load-bearing part of this file:^[2]

Read the second row against what happened in August 2019. The constitutional status of the territory was altered while its politicians were in detention and its communications were cut. In the same year, a Kashmiri political leader’s phone shows signs of targeting by military-grade spyware sold by a foreign state’s licensed exporter.

Who else was selected

Named in the reporting as of consistent interest to an Indian client between roughly 2017 and 2019:^[1]

• Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head of the Hurriyat Conference — and his driver;
• at least four members of the family of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, including his son-in-law, the journalist Iftikhar Gilani, and his son, the scientist Syed Naseem Geelani;
• the human rights activist Waqar Bhatti;
• at least five Kashmiri journalists, including Muzamil Jaleel of The Indian Express, Aurangzeb Naqshbandi, then of the Hindustan Times, and Sumir Kaul of Press Trust of India.

A driver. A dead man’s phone. A scientist. Five working reporters. Whatever a counter-terrorism rationale is supposed to cover, it does not obviously cover the household staff and the bereaved relatives of political figures.

It did not stop

In December 2023 Amnesty International published a further forensic investigation finding repeated use of Pegasus against high-profile Indian journalists, confirming infection on the iPhones of Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, and Anand Mangnale, South Asia editor at the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.^[3]

The Government of India has not confirmed whether it purchased or deployed Pegasus. It has not denied it in terms either. A Supreme Court-appointed technical committee examined a set of phones and reported that it could not conclusively establish Pegasus use on those it inspected, while noting a lack of cooperation from the government. File 09 →

Where the tools come from

Pegasus is one product of a much larger relationship, and the scale of it is a matter of public record kept by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

What is bought is directly relevant to a dossier about surveillance and crowd control: surveillance equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles, radars and surface-to-air missiles. Israeli Heron drones and Barak missile systems are in Indian service. The relationship dates to the establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1992 and deepened markedly after 2014.

And it runs both ways, which this site reports because leaving it out would be the kind of selective quotation it criticises elsewhere: Amnesty International has reported that India supplied close to 400,000 weapons parts to Israel during the war in Gaza.^[4]

Why this belongs in a human rights dossier

Not because of who makes the software. Because of what it does to the possibility of documenting anything at all.

The argument of this whole site is that the record is checkable. That depends on people being able to gather it: journalists who can speak to sources, lawyers who can take instructions, human rights workers who can interview a survivor without exposing them. Military-grade spyware on a journalist’s phone does not merely read that journalist’s messages. It reads every source who ever trusted them.

Set this beside the rest of the file: the coordinator of the organisation that produced the 432-case torture archive was imprisoned for four years and seven months and, on release, barred from travelling to Kashmir. Twenty-five books were banned and bookshops raided in August 2025. The websites of JKCCS and the International People’s Tribunal no longer resolve at all. Around 8,000 social media accounts were blocked after April 2025.

Those are not separate stories. They are one policy with several instruments: make the documentation impossible, and the atrocity becomes unprovable. This site exists because that policy is close to working.