Read on the app
Is WhatsApp going to be shut down in India? The government answered this question asked by a Congress MP in Parliament. The Center says that so far nothing has been said in this regard by WhatsApp or its parent company Meta. The special thing is that earlier WhatsApp had told the Delhi High Court that if the government asked it to break the message encryption, it would stop working in India.
In Rajya Sabha, Congress MP Vivek Tankha had asked a question related to the working of the messaging service. According to media reports, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav gave a written reply to this, ‘It has already been shared by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that WhatsApp or Meta have not informed the government about any such plan.’
Tankha’s question was whether WhatsApp was stopping working in India due to the government’s instructions to share user information. He referred to Section 69A of the IT Act 2000. On this, the government said that the Center had issued instructions in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of India, security of India, good relations with foreign countries or public order.
Earlier, WhatsApp had opposed the amended IT rules. The company said that these violate the right to privacy and are unconstitutional. The app had told the Delhi High Court that its end-to-end encryption protects the privacy of users. Due to this, only the sender and the receiver can read the message. WhatsApp had said, ‘As a platform, we are saying that if we are asked to break the encryption, WhatsApp will go away from here.’
He said that people use WhatsApp only because of its privacy features. Statistics show that WhatsApp has more than 4 crore users in India.
