Rahul Gandhi rakes up 'PM surrender' claim again, alleges 'no plan' to tackle COVID

With India's COVID-19 cases crossing the five lakh-mark, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday claimed that the government has no plan to defeat the pandemic. Continuing with his line of attack on the Prime Minister, he said that PM Narendra Modi has surrendered as he refuses to fight coronavirus.

He also tagged a report that claimed the government had "retreated" as no meeting of the ICMR panel or the Group of Ministers had taken place and neither had the Health Ministry held its briefings on the pandemic.

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Rahul Gandhi had taken to Twitter and accused the Prime Minister of surrendering the Indian territory to Chinese aggression. In a fiery response, Home Minister Amit Shah shared a message of an injured soldier's father, wherein the old man asked the Gandhi family scion to refrain from politics in matters of Army and security of the country. Rahul Gandhi was then schooled by EAM S Jaishankar on various agreements between India and China, when he wrongly claimed that Indian soldiers at the Galwan valley were 'unarmed.' He then issued a 'Surender Modi' attack at the Prime Minister. 

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India's COVID tally

Six days after it recorded four lakh infections, India's COVID-19 tally raced past five lakh on Saturday with the highest single-day surge of 18,552 cases, while the death toll climbed to 15,685, according to Union health ministry data. The COVID-19 caseload zoomed to 5,08,953, while 384 fresh fatalities were recorded in the last 24 hours.

The number of active cases stands at1,97,387, while 2,95,880 people have recovered and one patient has migrated, according to the updated figure at 8 AM.  "Thus, around 58.13 per cent patients have recovered so far," an official said. The total number of confirmed cases include foreigners.

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Of the 384 new deaths reported till Saturday morning,175 were in Maharashtra, 63 in Delhi, 46 in Tamil Nadu, 19 in Uttar Pradesh, 18 in Gujarat, 13 in Haryana,12 in Andhra Pradesh, 10 each inWest Bengal and Karnataka, seven in Telangana, four in Madhya Pradesh, two in Punjab, one each in Jammu and Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. 

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