Snoopgate probe: Retired Allahabad HC judge tapped
The move to appoint Srivastava to look into the so-called Snoopgate controversy comes 12 days before the results of a general election widely expected to go against the ruling Congress-led UPA. No judge will be part of snoopgate probe: Jaitley
The government has identified retired Allahabad high court judge Achal Behari Srivastava, an octogenarian who once sought a Congress election ticket, to head the panel probing allegations that Narendra Modi ordered illegal surveillance of a woman architect.
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The move to appoint Srivastava to look into the so-called Snoopgate controversy comes 12 days before the results of a general election widely expected to go against the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
Neither Srivastava or home secretary Anil Goswami replied to text messages on the matter from HT. The judge was traced to Kolkata where, his nephew said, he had gone to attend to a relative injured in a cricket game and was therefore unavailable to talk to the press.
Srivastava, who turns 80 in November, retired from the high court in 1996. It is understood that he then expressed his desire to contest the 1998 Lok Sabha polls from Varanasi on a Congress platform.
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But the NGO Srivastava was heading, Rule of Law Society, was against the idea because it wanted to be apolitical. In the end he did not fight the polls.
But the NGO Srivastava was heading, Rule of Law Society, was against the idea because it wanted to be apolitical. In the end he did not fight the polls.
Supreme Court advocate Balwant Singh, who was the president of the Ghazipur Bar Association in the past, told Hindustan Times that Srivastava was a member of the Congress national manifesto drafting committee in 1998-99. Singh, who was also a Congress member, confirmed Srivastava’s political affiliations with Congress.
Srivastava lives in Allahabad with his wife, who is a former professor of Sanskrit at the CMP College.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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