The Congress on Wednesday blasted the government for alleged illegal surveillance on citizens in violation of a Supreme Court verdict declaring individual privacy a fundamental right.

Referring to a newspaper report that suggested that the government had been asking telecom companies to hand over call data records of all mobile subscribers, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said: “The Supreme Court has said the right to privacy is a fundamental right. This government has been repeatedly violating that order. They are hell-bent on transforming India into an Orwellian state.”

The report in The Indian Express said the request for call records had been routed to telecom operators through the local units of the department of telecommunications.

The Congress, which has repeatedly raised the issue of illegal surveillance and encroachment into the private space of citizens in the past few years, said on Wednesday that the latest revelations were scary and a threat to democracy.

“This is extremely disturbing because the government has decided that it will carry out mass surveillance on the citizens of India. A sinister premeditated plot has been put in place in order to unleash a mass surveillance programme on the citizens, which is an absolute transgression of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Supreme Court in a 9-0 judgment,” Tewari said.

The Congress spokesperson added: “We strongly condemn this assault on the fundamental freedoms that have been provided in the Constitution and have been interpreted by the Supreme Court. We will hold the government to account. Rules had been tightened by the previous UPA government in 2013 with regard to obtaining call detail records with regard to electronic interception of telephones and cyber communication. Why and how are these things being violated with impunity on a daily basis?”

Demanding that the government explain under which rule such an alleged request for records had been made to the telecom companies, Tewari said: “National security cannot be the fig leaf in order to legitimise every crime. There is a laid-down procedure and that prescribes that reasons should be recorded in writing for seeking call records of an individual. You cannot do it on a blanket basis.

“It violates rules under the Telegraph Act that had been formulated post the PUCL Vs Union of India judgment delivered on December 18, 1996. It is a violation of Section 69 of the Information Technology Act. What the government has done is a monstrous crime.”

The newspaper report suggested that call records had been sought for mobile subscribers in the Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab telecom circles.

It also said the Cellular Operators Association of India, the industry body that represents all major telecom operators, had red-flagged these requests in a complaint to department of telecommunications secretary Anshu Prakash on February 12, 2020.