Amit Shah on Sunday said the BJP’s call-in campaign to drum up support for the new citizenship law had nothing to do with the online streaming platform Netflix, but did not address the social media sleaze fest seeking to lure people into dialling the phone number.

“Since yesterday, rumours are being spread that the number belongs to some channel called Netflix. I would like to clarify that the number never belonged to Netflix. Rather it is the BJP’s toll-free number,” the BJP president told a rally of party workers.

On Saturday, Netflix had specifically called in an attempt to make people dial the number for free subscriptions, tweeting that it was “absolutely fake”. None has claimed so far that the phone number was Netflix’s, and the BJP’s official campaign message is for people to give a missed call to the number to register support for the CAA.

The tweet that Netflix had responded to had claimed that the number, which matched the BJP’s campaign number, should be contacted for “free Netflix subscription for 6 months”.

Social media had erupted in a wildfire of sleaze messages on Saturday, with certain users sharing the number with lures of sex chats and more. Many “lonely young” women had sought to be suggestively contacted on the number.

Shah did not refer to any of this on Sunday.

While the party chief and other leaders sought to distance themselves from the lewd lure on Twitter, the party’s information technology cell head pointed fingers at the “dirty tricks department” of the Opposition. None from the BJP, however, has lodged an official complaint with Twitter. Every call to the number, for whatever reason, adds to the ranks of purported supporters of the CAA.

The party’s social media operatives have in the past moved swiftly to lobby social media sites and have what they consider inimical to their interests taken down.

“We will inform you when we take the next steps,” was the response of BJP information technology chief Amit Malviya on Sunday when asked whether the party had lodged a complaint with Twitter.

On his Twitter handle, Malviya claimed that the “dirty tricks department” of the Opposition had been “exposed” and posted two purported clarifications from Vodafone Idea Ltd and an intermediary company seeking to certify that the number was the telecom company’s and had been assigned to the BJP’s missed-call campaign.

“This is to confirm that 8866288662 is exclusive property of Vodafone Idea Limited. We also confirm that this number has been exclusively assigned to our customer Cosmic Information & Technology Limited from February 2017. We understand that Cosmic in turn has deployed it for a missed call campaign initiated by the Bharatiya Janata Party from 2nd Jan 2020 and that this number was not used by Cosmic for any other individual or enterprise customer for the last two years,” the purported communication from Vodafone, uploaded by Malviya, said.