As part of efforts to get support for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), BJP has been exploring different ideas one after another, starting from Jaggi Vasudev, a self-styled guru to advocate for the Act, to the latest attempt – a Twitter message of the Union home minister Amit Shah.
In his tweet message, Shah shared a phone number saying, “To extend your support for the historic Citizenship Amendment Act-2019 brought in by the PM @Narendra Modi’s government, to ensure justice to the religiously persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, kindly give a missed call on 88662-88662. #IndiaSupportsCAA.”
But the same number was shared by many Twitter accounts supposedly of women seeking “companionship”, and this went viral on social media throughout the day today. Other tweets have appeared, holding out the promise of employment, Netflix subscriptions, and 2 GB of mobile data, if the number is called.
This has caused questions to be raised whether the BJP was resorting to various kinds of lures, to get people to call the number. BJP’s plan was to showcase the quantum of support for the CAA through the ‘missed calls’ made to the number tweeted by Shah and other senior BJP leaders.
The Statesman made four calls to this number during this evening but all the calls got disconnected. A location tracking App showed that the number is based in Gujarat. “It’s a genuine number tweeted by Amit Shahji but there might be conspiracies of some sections that are doing such mischief to tarnish the image of the Central government as well the party. We are seriously looking into it and will take help from the cyber crime experts,” said Rahul Sinha, national general secretary of BJP and former state president of BJP in Bengal.
PM Narendra Modi has made it clear that the government won’t budge an ‘inch’ on the CAA despite the countrywide protests against the Act. On Friday, Shah while launching ‘awareness programme’ in support of the CAA in Jodhpur in Rajasthan said his party would take out 500 rallies across the country beginning from Saturday. He said that they launched counteroffensive because of the ‘misinformation campaign being carried out by the Opposition parties against CAA.’