Chinese Surveillance: Firm Tracks 10,000 Indians, Including PM, Prez

Amid the escalating border row between India and China, an investigation by the Indian Express has revealed that a Shenzen-based technology company which has links to the Chinese government has been keeping an eye on over 10,000 Indians, which includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Ram Nath Kovind and others.

The daily reported that it has extracted the metadata of Zhenhua’s operations from the massive dump of log files that constituted what the company called the Overseas Key Information Database (OKIDB).

A source from the company had provided the data to The Indian Express, The Australian Financial Review, Italy’s Il Foglio and The Daily Telegraph, London, it reported.

The report read, "From President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Congress interim President Sonia Gandhi and their families; Chief Ministers Mamata Banerjee, Ashok Gehlot and Amarinder Singh to Uddhav Thackeray, Naveen Patnaik and Shivraj Singh Chouhan; Cabinet Ministers Rajnath Singh and Ravi Shankar Prasad to Nirmala Sitharaman, Smriti Irani, and Piyush Goyal; Chief of Defence Staff Bipin Singh Rawat to at least 15 former Chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force; Chief Justice of India Sharad Bobde and brother judge AM Khanwilkar to Lokpal Justice P C Ghose and Comptroller and Auditor General G C Murmu; start-up tech entrepreneurs like Nipun Mehra, founder of Bharat Pe (an Indian payment app), and Ajay Trehan of AuthBridge," are under the company's radar.

Not just the leaders, the company also tracked relatives of the VVIPs, including Prime Minister Modi (wife Jashodaben); President Kovind (wife Savita Kovind); former PM Manmohan Singh (wife Gursharan Kaur and their daughters Upinder, Daman, Amrit); Sonia Gandhi (husband, the late Rajiv, son Rahul Gandhi, daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra).

Other non-political figures include Sachin Tendulkar, film director Shyam Benegal, classical dancer Sonal Mansingh, among others.