MUMBAI: Even as the NCP joined the Congress on Monday to demand the setting up of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the purported WhatsApp chats between Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami and former BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta which raised questions about whether Goswami was privy to information about India’s Balakot airstrikes in advance, Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said the state government was “gathering information about the leaked chats.”
“Some highly sensitive things including the Balakot airstrikes and the Pulwama attack have been mentioned in the chats. We are looking as to how Arnab Goswami got access to such sensitive information. We have called a meeting on Tuesday to decide our next course of action,” Deshmukh, who belongs to the NCP, said.
Details of the WhatsApp chats have triggered a political controversy over whether Goswami shared sensitive information with Dasgupta on the government’s plans for a retaliatory strike in Balakot in the wake of the February 2019 Pulwama terror attack. The conversation between the two purportedly took place on February 23, 2019 – three days before the airstrikes in Balakot in Pakistan.
In Chandrapur, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the students’ wing of the Congress, on Monday lodged a complaint against Goswami for leaking sensitive information three days before the airstrikes.
The chats are part of the Mumbai police’s 3,600-page supplementary chargesheet filed in the TRP manipulation scam.
The Pulwama attack in which 40 CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) personnel were killed took place on February 14, 2019. In the midst of a WhatsApp conversation late in the evening of February 23, 2019, Goswami purportedly told Dasgupta, “On another note something big will happen.” To Dasgupta’s “Dawood?” message, Goswami’s replied, “No sir Pakistan. Something major will be done this time.”
When Dasgupta further inquired, “Strike? Or bigger,” Goswami answered, “Bigger than a normal strike.”
Ever since the transcripts emerged in the public domain last weekend, the Opposition has accused Goswami of leaking sensitive information related to national security, questioned how and why he got hold of such information beforehand – when even the political opposition was in the dark — and accused the Modi government of exploiting a defence-related issue to drum up popular support during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.