Amidst the tension between Huawei and the U.S government, India is planning to develop its chat application similar to WhatsApp for government agencies to protect from any sort of vulnerabilities from geopolitical developments, according to a report from ET.
“There are strong discussions that for strategic and security reasons, over a period of time, we should have email, messaging…all sorts of systems, at least for government communication, which doesn’t depend on outside players,” said an official, according to the report. “We need to make our communication insular.”
According to the officials, any sort of formal communications and data transmission must take over secure network and has to be stored in India. Notably, the Indian government is under pressure to ban Huawei’s 5G as well.
“Look what happened to Huawei, their Honor (branded) phones,” the official said. “It was unthinkable, but now it has definitely rung alarm bells with us. Tomorrow, if the US finds us unreliable for some reason, all they need to do is ask their companies to slow down networks in India and everything here will come to a standstill. We are vulnerable and we must take steps to cover that.”
Moreover, all the officials will be eventually informed to stop using other private apps like Gmail or Whatsapp for official purposes.