Minutes ahead of the commencement of the monsoon session of Parliament, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the rise in Covid-19 cases, saying he is “busy with peacocks” while the number of infections are set to cross five million in the country.
Gandhi said the government had asked the people to become “aatmanirbhar (self-reliant)” which means they have to save their lives on their own.
“Unplanned lockdown is the product of one person’s ego and because of it coronavirus has spread throughout the country,” he tweeted in Hindi.
“Modi government said become ‘aatmanirbhar’ which means save your life yourself because the PM is busy with peacocks,” Gandhi said in an apparent reference to a recent video showing the Prime Minister feeding the peacocks.
He said the number of Covid-19 infections in the country will cross five million this week and active cases will surpass one million.
The Congress leader has been critical of the government over its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Congress has been attacking the Prime Minister and his government for “failing to control” the spread of the Covid-19, with India surpassing Brazil to record the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world.
The party has maintained that the Prime Minister should tell the nation his future strategy and the plans to contain the pandemic.
India’s GDP shrank by the steepest ever— 23.9% —in the April-June period as the Covid-19-induced nationwide lockdown battered an already slowing economy.
India’s Covid-19 tally crossed 4.8 million on Monday with 92,071 new infections being reported in a day, while the death toll climbed to 79,722 with 1,136 people succumbing to the infection in a span of 24 hours.
On Saturday, Gandhi had attacked the government on the decline in the GDP, job losses and the increasing number of Covid-19-related cases and deaths in the country.
Taking a jibe at the Modi government, he had said its “well-planned fight against Covid-19 has put India in an abyss of 1.historic GDP reduction of 24%, 2.12 crore jobs lost, 3. Rs 15.5 lakh crore additional stressed loans, 4. Globally highest daily Covid cases & deaths. But for GOI and media ‘sab changa si’.”
Apart from the ongoing India-China border standoff, the Congress and other opposition parties have decided to raise, among other issues, the Covid-19 situation and the current state of economy in the monsoon session of Parliament, beginning Monday.
