‘Sanchaar Saathi’ is a ‘spy app’, an attempt to turn the country into a dictatorship: Priyanka Gandhi

The Department of Telecommunications has instructed mobile handset manufacturers and importers to ensure that the fraud-reporting app ‘Sanchaar Saathi’ is pre-installed on all new mobile devices,Priyanka Gandhi said.

“‘Sanchaar Saathi’ is a spy app, and it is clearly ridiculous. Citizens have the right to privacy. Everyone should have the right to privacy to send messages to family and friends without the government watching.”She claimed,

“This is not just about snooping on telephones. They (the government) are turning this country into a dictatorship in every way. Parliament is not functioning because the government is refusing to discuss any issue. It’s very easy to level allegations against the opposition, but they are not allowing discussion on anything — and this is not democracy”,She said.

The Lok Sabha MP further said,“There is a very fine line between reporting fraud and monitoring what every citizen of India is doing on their phone… There should be an effective system to report fraud. We have discussed this at length in the context of cyber security. Cyber security is needed, but that does not mean it gives you an excuse to enter every citizen’s phone.”

She also remarked,“I don’t think any citizen would be happy about this.”