New Delhi
Two serving colonels who challenged official policy, a retired intelligence officer who took RAW to court, and two serving BSF officers also figure in the Pegasus Project database as persons of interest for an unidentified agency, The Wire reported.
KK Sharma, who was head of the Border Security Force (BSF) in 2018, his telephone numbers were added to a list of numbers containing several hundreds from India marked as probable targets for surveillance.
Another officer who was marked for probable surveillance was Jitendra Kumar Ojha, a retired senior official from the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India's external spy agency. His number figures in the database as does his wife's, The Wire reported.
Ojha, who was in-charge of training Indian spies at RAW's academy in Delhi between 2013 and 2015 and also served in London, was eased out of the service in January 2018.
The leaked database also contains the numbers of at least two Indian Army officers who took on the government on service-related matters.
Colonel Mukul Dev shot to prominence in 2017 when he sent a legal notice to the secretary of defence arguing against the government order to scrap free rations for officers who are posted in peace areas. He was posted as deputy judge advocate general in the Jodhpur-based 12 Corps, The Wire reported.
Colonel Amit Kumar was also from the legal division within the armed forces and selected for potential surveillance at around the same time as Dev.