Disregarding Parliament

Govt officials cannot be allowed to ignore committees

The head of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, Shashi Tharoor, has written to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, urging him to take action against officials of the Union government who refused to appear before the committee. The committee was to examine a number of issues on Wednesday last week — but one of those, the allegations of phone-tampering and tapping associated with the Israeli Pegasus software, was probably the most relevant to this dispute. Mr Tharoor’s letter alleged that officials from three relevant Union ministries — electronics and information technology, communications, and home affairs — had been