Amid the removal of Jack Dorsey's Bitchat from app stores in India following the IT Ministry's order, government sources on Tuesday said the Bluetooth messaging app was a law-and-order concern and had to be removed.
The government is duty-bound to maintain law and order, sources asserted.
Bitchat, they said, allowed anyone to turn on Bluetooth and send messages through several hops, and that this was a law-and-order concern.
Apple has officially removed the offline messaging application, Bitchat, from its India App Store after a demand from the country's IT ministry, Jack Dorsey said in an X post on Saturday.
"Government of India officially removes Bitchat from the App Store," Dorsey, who is the app's developer and Twitter co-founder, wrote in his post, alongside a screenshot of a notice from Apple's App Review team.
The app has also been pulled down from the Play Store.
Bitchat came under government scrutiny in July this year, coinciding with the Cockroach Janta Party's protests over exam paper leaks.
At that time, the Home Ministry's cybercrime arm, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, had ordered Microsoft subsidiary GitHub to remove Bitchat.
Currently, CJP has started a nationwide agitation demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over voter roll revision and the Election Commission's functioning.
