NEW DELHI (The Thursday Times) — Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in India’s Lok Sabha, has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of tapping his phone, saying the device holds evidence against Modi that would come out if the two ever debated face to face. The BJP called the charge baseless and said he had offered no proof.
Gandhi made the claim during an “Ask Me Anything” session on Instagram on Friday. “The proof is here. It is in this phone. The PM knows it because he taps my phone,” he said, adding that a one-on-one debate would show “who is controlled by foreign powers, who is an anti-national.”
He repeated the debate dare he made earlier this month, saying he was not allowed to speak in parliament and that his microphone had been switched off during debates on the farm laws, alleged vote theft, the revision of electoral rolls, China, and other issues. He proposed a table with Modi on one side and himself on the other, and said he would not object if the industrialist Gautam Adani or the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, judged it. “I guarantee that the prime minister will not remain the PM after a one-on-one debate with me,” he said.
Gandhi also said Modi had stopped attacking him personally. “There is a little fear in his mind because he is no longer commenting about me,” he said.
The BJP hit back within hours. B. L. Verma, a junior minister for consumer affairs, said: “We call it a serious allegation when there is evidence to support it. Unless you have evidence or proof of something, you have no right to make any allegations.” The party’s spokesman, Tuhin Sinha, called Gandhi “a habitual liar” who practises “hit-and-run politics,” and said the claim did not square with Gandhi’s earlier assertion that senior bureaucrats were passing information to him.
Sinha also pointed to Gandhi’s meeting with President Droupadi Murmu five weeks ago, when, he said, she asked the Congress leader to come back with evidence of vote theft. “Today, he claims that all the evidence is in his phone and, therefore, his phone is being tapped,” Sinha said.
Congress leaders in several states have since rallied behind Gandhi, while the Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde dismissed the charge as “Modi phobia.”
The allegation is not new. During the Pegasus spyware row in 2021, Gandhi said his phones were being tapped, and at an event in California in 2023 he held up his iPhone and joked, “Hello! Mr Modi.”
