The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has accused Congress of being involved with a London-based firm Cambridge Analytica, which is indicted of harvesting private data from millions of Facebook profiles to influence and identify voter behaviour.

BJP spokesperson and Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, in a press conference asked Congress president Rahul Gandhi to come clean on the issue as he questioned the party’s association with a “rogue data analysis firm.”

“Will Congress party depend upon data manipulation and theft to win votes? Mr. Rahul Gandhi should explain the role of Cambridge Analytica in his social media profile,” he said in a tweet.

Cambridge Analytica is infamous in news due to a data leak controversy for accessing millions of Facebook users’ personal data, which is used to decipher the personalities of American voters by studying their digital footprint and then influencing their behaviour to help US president Donald Trump win elections.

Prasad quoted an Economic Times report from October 2017 that revealed that the Congress party had roped in the controversial agency to run their 2019 and termed it as their ‘Brahmastra’ against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

According to media reports, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has met several opposition leaders to design electoral strategy for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the next Lok Sabha elections. The company has made a presentation to the Congress in which it detailed the strategy to target voters online.

Similar suggestions were made in a Hindustan Times report in an article published two days ago, wherein it claimed that the firm has its eyes set on wooing politicians in South Asia. The report also claimed that the firm was in touch with both Congress and the BJP.

However, by calling out Congress first for being in talks with the controversial data analysis firm, the BJP may have scored a political goal.

The Fearless Indian’s Opinion: It is horrendous for any party to collaborate with organisations that offer such unethical and illegal data tampering. It goes completely against the democratic values and the method of free and fair elections in India. If any party or organisation is caught using such illegitimate means of influencing the country’s electoral process they should be dealt with as per Law.