Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Monday accused the Narendra Modi of ‘suppressing and manipulating’ data related to the pandemic and using it as ‘tool for propaganda’ to save the government’s image.
As part of her Zimmedaar Kaun [who is responsible] campaign, in which she has been questioning the government over its handling of the second wave, Ms. Vadra focussed on ‘data manipulation to hide the real the picture’.
“The Modi government’s emphasis on propaganda over saving lives has caused immense damage. It is answerable to the people of India,” she said in a post shared on Facebook page, twitter handle and Instagram.
Image management
“Does the Modi government’s image management matter more than COVID management? Is it more important to save the Prime Minister’s image than it is to save Indian lives?”
She claimed right from the beginning of the pandemic, deaths and infections were reported as a ratio of the population while testing was reported as an absolute figure.
“This was designed to mislead the public into believing that the infection and death rates were not alarming, while the testing rates were sufficient. In fact, it was exactly the opposite,” she said.
She cited the examples of Uttar Pradesh, where the government clubbed RT-PCR and antigen test data together to ‘manipulate the truth’.
The Modi government seems to be following the same pattern on data surrounding the vaccination programme today, she said.
The Congress leader also raised the issue of discrepancy in the official record of deaths as revealed by the government and those collected from cremation and burial grounds across Gujarat and U.P.
She slammed the U.P. government for trying to start a safai abhiyan (cleaning programme) when news reports and drone camera footage revealed that 2,000 bodies were found along a 1,100-km stretch on the banks of the Ganga, spanning 27 districts.
“None of these deaths find space in government records.”
Calls to make data public ignored
Ms. Vadra said though experts across India have been demanding that data regarding the virulence and spread of the pandemic should be made public, the government has largely ignored such calls.
“Did it not understand the import of correct use of data as one of the most essential tools to fight COVID, or was there some other reason behind its actions?”
