BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra hit back at the Congress a day after the latter cited some audio clips to accuse some saffron party leaders, including Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, of conspiring to topple the Ashok Gehlot government in the state.
Patra said that senior Congress leaders, including chief minister Gehlot, have claimed that these audio clips are authentic even though the FIR registered by the police rejects the authenticity.
“These are serious questions that we want to ask the Congress high command and Ashok Gehlot. Was phone tapping done? Assuming that you’ve tapped phones, was the SOP followed? Did the Congress government in Rajasthan use unconstitutional ways to save themselves when they found themselves cornered?” Patra asked at a press conference.
“People of Rajasthan want to know whether their privacy has been compromised,” he said, asking if phones of people related to politics are being tapped? Is it not a case of veiled emergency in Rajasthan?” he asked.
Patra demanded an immediate reaction from the state government and called for a CBI investigation into this “saga of illegalities and concocted lies”.
He cited regulations governing phone tapping to say that it can only be done by authorised agencies as per due process of law and subject to approved safeguards and a standard operating procedure (SOP).
Patra also insisted that the political crisis in Rajasthan is an outcome of a factional feud between Gehlot and rebel Congress leader Sachin Pilot and noted that the chief minister had said that he was not on “talking terms” with his deputy for 18 months.
The two groups had been fighting since the Congress won the assembly elections in the state in 2018 over who would become chief minister, the BJP spokesperson said.
They have been in a “cold war”, he said.Scoffing at the Congress’s allegation that the BJP was behind the rebellion, Patra cited Gehlot’s recent digs at Pilot and said that the conspiracy grew within the state’s ruling party.
“The political drama unfolding in the Congress in Rajasthan is a cocktail of conspiracies, concocted stories, manufactured lies and illegalities…The sin was theirs. Conspiracies existed within the Congress,” he alleged.
The Congress has a history of “phone tapping and bugging”, Patra said and referred to a row involving Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram, both senior ministers in the erstwhile Congress-led UPA government, over alleged snooping.
However, the Congress said that BJP’s demand for a CBI probe into the audiotapes that showed a conspiracy to topple the Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan “amounted to an admission of guilt” and it was now clear that the party was behind the rebellion by Sachin Pilot and others.
The Congress also mentioned that Pilot and other rebel MLAs are taking shelter in a hotel in the BJP-ruled Haryana to allege the saffron party’s involvement in “horse-trading”.
