BJP govt in Gujarat tapped phones of youth, innocent women: Hardik Patel

With his appointment as working president of the Congress unit in Gujarat, it has been expected Hardik Patel would take a tough line against the ruling BJP.

Hardik did just that on Saturday even as the BJP accused the Rajasthan government of tapping phones in a bid to disrupt attempts by disgruntled leader Sachin Pilot and his loyalists to destabilise it.

Hardik tweeted about old phone-tapping allegations against the Gujarat government, some of which centred on his own rise as a leader of the Patidar community's agitation for reservation.

Hardik tweeted, "The unwarranted allegations of phone tapping on the Rajasthan Congress government do not look good to the BJP. The BJP may be forgetting that their government in Gujarat has tapped the phones of the youth and implicated us in a false case. Let me tell you, the BJP government of Gujarat also tapped the phones of innocent women."

In 2015, Hardik Patel and several of his aides were arrested on charges of sedition and waging war against the government over the Patidar reservation protests. Reports at the time claimed the Gujarat government started tapping the phones of Hardik and his associates in August 2015, even though permission for this was granted in October that year.

Hardik had then moved the Gujarat High Court challenging the phone tapping and sought an inquiry into it.

Hardik Patel's tweet came after BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra alleged on Saturday that the Congress government in Rajasthan resorted to "unconstitutional" methods to tap phones of politicians and demanded a CBI probe into what it called a "saga of illegalities and concocted lies". People of Rajasthan want to know whether their privacy has been compromised, Patra said, asking if phones of people related to politics are being tapped.