'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again': Rahul Gandhi slams Centre on lockdown, urges govt to infuse cash into hands of poor

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday slammed the Central Government over the rise in coronavirus cases in India during the various phases of the lockdown, while urging it once again to infuse cash into the hands of the poor in order to restart the economy. Taking a swipe at the government on Twitter, the former Congress chief shared graphs of the rise in COVID-19 cases in India in four different phases of the lockdown with a quote which read, “‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ - Anonymous”.

”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Anonymous pic.twitter.com/tdkS3dK8qm

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 13, 2020

In another post, Gandhi warned that if the government doesn’t infuse cash into the economy, “the poor will be decimated, the middle class will be the new poor and crony capitalists will own the country”. [caption id=“attachment_8438691” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] FIle Image of Rahul Gandhi. PTI[/caption] He cited a news report about the plight of retrenched workers of a private company, who were staring at a long battle ahead. Gandhi has asked the government to provide Rs 10,000 cash in the hands of each poor family immediately and provide them with Rs 7,500 every month for the next six months for them to survive effects of the lockdown. He has also called for a financial stimulus package for the small and medium industries. Gandhi’s remarks came as India surpassed the three lakh-mark with the worst daily spike of 11,458 infections, while the toll due to the novel coronavirus climbed to 8,884 with 386 new fatalities. India took 64 days to cross the one lakh-mark from 100 cases, then in another fortnight it reached the grim milestone of two lakh cases. On Thursday, it overtook the United Kingdom in terms of coronavirus cases to become the fourth worst-hit country, according to the Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University data. On Friday, Gandhi had tweeted, “India is firmly on its way to winning the wrong race. A horrific tragedy, resulting from a lethal blend of arrogance and incompetence.” The Congress leader has been asking the government to provide cash in the hands of the people and to the small industries, to enable them to restart the economy, which has suffered a setback due to the coronavirus-induced lockdown. The government has also held back the release of complete data of index of industrial production (IIP) for April, saying it is not appropriate to compare the IIP data with earlier months due to COVID-19 lockdown. With inputs from PTI