Rahul quotes Einstein to attack Centre over lockdown ‘failure’

NEW DELHI: Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's meetings with chief ministers on Tuesday and Wednesday to decide the further containment strategy to stop the spread of COVID-19, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who had initially announced no to criticise the government, on Monday targeted the government over the previous stages of lockdown.

Taking to Twitter, Gandhi quoted scientist Albert Einstein to attack the government by saying that this lockdown proves that “the only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”

The former Congress chief also tagged a video graphic that claimed the lockdown flattened the wrong curve. Notably, earlier in an interaction with the Congress leader and noted industrialist Rajiv Bajaj, the latter had said that India has flattened the “wrong curve”, pointing to the decline in GDP.

Using retail activity as a ‘proxy for the economy,' the graph showed the economy going from zero in lockdown 1 to almost -90 (on a scale of 0 to -100) between lockdown 2 and 3.

On the other hands, the COVID-19 infections grew from 100s in the first week of March to 1,000s. From initially supporting the nationwide lockdown, Congress changed its position and described the measure as being a case of ‘the cure being worse than the disease.'

The Congress had been particularly critical of the Modi government's handling of the migrant workers' issue and the government's refusal to go for direct cash transfer into the Jan Dhan accounts of the poor.

Last week, Gandhi had shared a similar graph and claimed that how India was about to win the ‘wrong race'. ‘India is firmly on its way to winning the wrong race. A horrific tragedy, resulting from a lethal blend of arrogance and incompetence,” Gandhi had tweeted last Friday with the graph that mapped India's rise in COVID-19 cases.

The video graphics showed that on March 22 –three days before the nationwide lockdown was announced –India was at the bottom of the list but rose to the number four position on June 12, behind the US, Brazil and Russia.

The graph also showed India had overtaken Italy, Spain, Iran and the United Kingdom, which initially saw a high number of cases.