Pakistan peddles Rahul Gandhi's debunked attack on India's COVID-19 casualty statistics

Picking up on the inflated lies peddled by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi via social media, a Pakistani news channel on Friday criticized the Indian government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pakistan’s state broadcaster PTV recently shared Gandhi’s tweet with a caption “Indian Opposition leader tweets regarding what experts call “vast COVID-19 deaths under-reporting in India.”

Keeping with his propensity to attack the Modi government, Rahul Gandhi had on Friday tweeted an interview of Prof Prabhat Jha with journalist Karan Thapar for a media outlet. He captioned the post: “GOI lies. World knows. India suffers.”

Pakistan TV shares Rahul Gandhi's distorted tweet

In the snippet from the interview, Prabhat Jha, the founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto is heard casting aspersions on India’s handling of Coronavirus. Without providing any substantial evidence, the professor is heard claiming that the World Health Organization does not trust India’s COVID-19 death count because the undercounting here is substantially greater than in other countries.

Baseless and misleading: Govt on the report of 'undercounting deaths'

However, the Government of India on Friday gave a scathing response to claims that there was underreporting of Coronavirus deaths in the country. Debunking the fake news, the Centre said that such reports are fallacious and ill-informed and are not based on facts. It stated that India has a robust system of birth and death reporting which is carried out regularly from the Gram Panchayat level to the District-level and State-level. 

"Reports alleging a ‘significant undercount’ of the actual COVID-19 death toll in first two waves are baseless, misleading abd ill-informed. The entire exercise is carried out under the Registrar General of India. All the deaths independently reported by States are being compiled centrally. Furthermore, there's an incentive in India to report COVID deaths as they are entitled to monetary compensation. Hence, the likelihood of underreporting is less," an official statement read.

This is not the first time Rahul Gandhi was seen casting aspersions at India’s handling of the COVID situation. Earlier, he also spread misinformation about India’s vaccination drive, questioning its efficacy and creating vaccine hesitancy among people. Pakistan has also always been quick to pick up on Congress’ propaganda to malign its country, through rampant falsehoods in the left media.

Image: PTI/AP