Moscow: Edward Snowden, the controversial 29 year old  CIA employee,  has sought asylum in India. In a request submitted to the Indian Embassy in Russia,  Snowden has sought refuge and asylum in India along with 20 other countries.
The requests were made to a number of countries including Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italian, Ireland, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Spain, Swiss Confederation, Venezuela.
Snowden is being financially supported by Wikileaks. On 30th June 2013 WikiLeaks’ legal advisor in the Edward Snowden matter, Sarah Harrison, submitted by hand a number of requests for asylum and asylum assistance on behalf of Edward J Snowden.
Snowden is wanted by US Government on charges of  theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person.
Working primarily with Glenn Greenwald of London’s The Guardian, which published a series of exposés based on Snowden’s disclosures in June 2013, Snowden revealed information about a variety of classified intelligence programs, including the interception of Indian, US and European telephone metadata and the PRISM and Tempora Internet surveillance programs.
However due to the present nature of India’s foreign policy, it is difficult to imagine that India would even consider giving him asylum. Infact External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid has indirectly denied granting any asylum to Snowden.
“India is not an open house for asylum”, he was quoted saying. This statement of his indicates that the Indian government is unlikely to consider the request given that Snowden has no travel documents.
India even doesn’t consider this act of US agencies as  spying or sniffing.
“I don’t think we should be raising it to such a high level…that it becomes a matter of serious question,†Khurshid was reported as saying by a news channel.
He further clarified, “There are issues that America is looking at. We discussed during (US Secretary of State) Kerry’s visit. Kerry and Obama have clarified, there is some information that they get out of scrutiny and they use it for terrorism purposes. It is only a computer study of patterns – meaning destination. It is not snooping.”
However reports indicate that, India is the fifth most tracked country by the US intelligence.  The PRISM program started  by NSA and CIA  involved tech giants Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype and YouTube to spy on private information of users around the world.