NEW DELHI.
Rahul Gandhi today said the BJP government is accusing the
Congress of having links with a dodgy data firm only to draw attention away from the controversy over the 39 Indian hostages killed in Iraq by
ISIS.
Reacting to the allegations made by IT minister
Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Congress President took to Twitter to call the data leak charges an "invention" by the BJP.
Union Minister Prasad had yesterday questioned grand old party's and its chief Rahul's links to the data analytics firm
Cambridge Analytica (CA), which has been accused of illegally mining private data of Facebook users to influence elections.
"There were reports of sudden surge in Rahul’s social media following by using bots. Does CA have any role in building fake following of Rahul on social media. Will the Congress party now depend upon data manipulation and data theft to win elections?” Prasad questioned.
The Congress communications-in-charge Randeep Surjewala rebutted the BJP minister's accusations by calling the BJP a "factory of fake news" and questioning the saffron party's links with CA instead.
"CA's linked website shows that in 2010 its services were used by BJP-JD(U). Firm's Indian partner Ovlene Business Intelligence is being run by BJP ally's MP's son. OBI company's services were used by Rajnath Singh in 2009," Surjewala told mediapersons.
CA is a British firm which came in the eye of the storm following an investigation by Britain's Channel 4 which alleged that the firm mined personal information of 50 million Facebook users for for President Donald Trump during the 2016 elections campaign.
