Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday continued to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s handling of India’s coronavirus crisis.
“Countless dead bodies are flowing in the rivers,” Gandhi said in a tweet. “There are miles-long lines at hospitals. The right to life security is snatched. PM, take off those rose-tinted glasses through which nothing is visible except the Central Vista Project.”
India is battling a severe second wave of the coronavirus. It has reported more than 3 lakh cases a day every day for the past three weeks, since April 22. On May 1, it hit a new record by crossing the 4-lakh mark, the highest single-day tally by any country in the world. This was surpassed on May 7, when India recorded 4.14 lakh daily cases. So far in May, India’s daily tally has crossed the 4-lakh mark on five days. Thousands have died every day, but reports allege that the government is severely undercounting Covid-19 deaths.
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The Central Vista project, an initiative of the Narendra Modi government, aims to redevelop a 3.2-km stretch called the Central Vista that lies at the heart of Lutyens Delhi built by the British in the 1930s. It involves tearing down and rebuilding several government buildings, including iconic landmarks, and constructing a new Parliament at a total cost of Rs 20,000 crore. The construction of the prime minister and vice president’s residences is likely to be over by 2022.
The Congress has criticised the project as the prime minister’s “personal vanity project” and added that it showed the “height of callousness and insensitivity” of the Modi government amid the massive surge in coronavirus cases in India, and was an “insult to the people of the country”.
Gandhi’s “bodies flowing in rivers” phrase was a reference to incidents in the past few days where dozens of decomposed bodies were seen floating in the Ganga river in Bihar’s Buxar district and in the Yamuna river in Uttar Pradesh. Villagers and officials suspected these were Covid fatalities who were thrown into the river, leading to massive panic and worry that residents will contract the coronavirus infection.
The Congress leader has been extremely critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic. On Monday, Gandhi referred to the Narendra Modi-led administration as an “app-dependent government”. He added that vaccines and not mobile applications would offer protection against the coronavirus.
Gandhi also criticised the Centre for its “repeated chest-thumping” at receiving foreign aid for tackling the coronavirus crisis. “Had the government done its job, it wouldn’t have come to this,” he had added.
Meanwhile, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution calling the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic “a grave calamity and direct consequence of the Modi government’s indifference, insensitivity and incompetence”.
“It is the direct result of the central government’s willful disregard of scientific advice, its premature declaration of victory over the pandemic (that turned out to be just the first wave), and its unwillingness and inability to plan in advance in spite of warnings sounded not only by public health experts but also by the standing committee of Parliament concerned,” the committee said.
On Tuesday morning, India recorded 3,29,942 new Covid-19 cases, taking the tally of infections in the country to 2,29,92,517 since the pandemic broke out in the country January 2020. The toll climbed by 3,876 to 2,49,992.
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