Daijiworld Media Network - New Delhi (SD)
New Delhi, Sep 14: Amid tensions between India and China over the last few months, reports about a technology company with links to the Chinese government monitoring high-profile Indians have stirred fresh controversy.
Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co Limited, a Shenzen-based company has been monitoring nearly 10,000 Indian individuals and organizations, a report by The Indian Express said.
The company is linked to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. It has been monitoring individuals and organizations cut across varied fields including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and many top political leaders besides bureaucrats in key positions, judges, scientists, academicians, journalists, religious figures, activists and even some include crime accused, the report said.
Besides the Prime Minister, eminent personalities under scanner include President Ram Nath Kovind, Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi including her families; union ministers Rajnath Singh, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharam, Smriti Irani and Piyush Goyal; chief ministers Mamtha Banerjee, Ashok Gehlot, Amarinder Singh, Uddhav Thackeray, Naveen Patnaik, Shivraj Singh Chouhan; Bipin Singh Rawat, chief of defence to nearly 15 former chiefs of the army, navy and the airforce, 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, an authentication technology firm, to top industrialists Ratan Tata and Gautam Adani.
In the ongoing standoff between the two nations at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the monitoring of the personalities seems prominent which can be termed as 'hybrid warfare' using non-military tools to attain dominance, subvert, influence or damage. Looking into the prominent personalities being monitored, it is evident that China has adopted a strategic non-military warfare apart from the border tension at LAC.
Zhenhua is known to be a registered company in China with the Chinese government and military its clients registered in April 2018 and it has 20 processing centres across countries and regions.