Amid the ongoing row over the “merger” of seven Rajya Sabha members of the AAP with the BJP — six of them from Punjab — another AAP MP got a call from someone allegedly impersonating Union home minister and BJP leader Amit Shah. This person asked Raj Kumar Chabbewal, Lok Sabha MP from Hoshiarpur, to “meet when in Delhi next”.
Chabbewal suspected it was a prank call using Amit Shah’s name; and filed a police complaint, it was learnt on Friday.
‘Meet me in Delhi,’ said caller
“It was my birthday and I had been getting a lot of calls since morning,” Raj Kumar Chabbewal, Lok Sabha MP from Hoshiarpur, said on Thursday.
Chabbewal, who was formerly with the Congress, said he received the call from an unknown number. The person on the other end said Amit Shah wanted to speak with him. Thereafter, another person came on the line and introducing himself as Amit Shah, and gave him birthday wishes.
“The call came around 8:45 am, in which the person told me that that home minister Amit Shah would speak to me. Then the other person (claiming to be Shah) congratulated me and asked me where I was. I told him that I was in Hoshiarpur. He also told me that whenever I come to Delhi, I must meet him. I said ‘OK’ and thanked him,” Chabbewal said.
He said that he later got suspicious as the call was not from any official government number; and official calls mostly came via landline, not on mobile phones. He said the voice of the man who introduced himself as Amit Shah also did not seem to match with Shah’s.
He said he left it to the police to find out if the caller was actually Amit Shah or a prankster. Shah has not reacted as of Friday evening.
What next?
Hoshiarpur senior superintendent of police (SSP) Sandeep Kumar Malik said the police received a complaint and an investigation was underway.
The AAP has three Lok Sabha MPs out of the total 13 in Punjab. The BJP has none. Besides Chabbewal, the other two AAP LS MPs are Malvinder Singh Kang from Anandpur Sahib and Gurmeet Singh ‘Meet’ Hayer from Sangrur.
The party is left with only one Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab after Raghav Chadha led a revolt that took away six from Punjab, including himself, plus Swati Maliwal from Delhi, into the BJP.
The AAP has since claimed complete unity among its MLAs, led by CM Bhagwant Mann, and the remaining MPs, as the state elections in Punjab are less than a year away now.
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