Rahul Gandhi on Thursday again accused the Narendra Modi government of manipulating the Covid death toll and focusing its energies on perception management instead of solving the people’s problems.

“Positivity is a PR stunt to hide the actual number of Corona deaths the Prime Minister’s actions have caused,” he tweeted, taking a swipe at the BJP’s call for “positivity” at a time the government’s mishandling of the epidemic has triggered public anger.

In another tweet he said: “Central Government’s priorities: Social media, false image. People’s priorities: Record-breaking inflation, vaccine for Corona. What kind of achhe din are these?”

Rahul’s remarks came a day after health minister Harsh Vardhan savagely targeted him in a tweet, saying: “Politics on dead bodies, Congress style! Vultures may be vanishing from trees but it appears their energy has been transferred into the vultures on the ground. Rahul Gandhi trusts New York more than Delhi. Learn politics over the dead from the vultures on the ground.”

Harsh Vardhan had been upset about Rahul posting a New York Times report that suggested the actual number of Covid deaths in India might be far higher than the official figures.

While the official Covid death toll in India is around 3 lakh, the NYT report gave a “conservative” estimate of 6 lakh dead, a “more likely scenario” of 16 lakh dead and “a worse scenario” of 42 lakh dead.

Other international media outlets too have suggested that the actual Covid death count in India could be much higher than the government figure.

While Harsh Vardhan saw Rahul’s decision to quote the NYT as a sign of his greater faith in New York than in Delhi, the BJP has over the past seven years gleefully lapped up any praise of Modi in the foreign media.

Many local dailies in several states too have flagged the mismatch between the official death figures and data collected from crematoriums and burial grounds.

The high number of death certificates issued in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi too appear to belie the Covid death tolls released by the state governments.

The anecdotal evidence — long queues for cremation and bodies buried on river banks or dumped into rivers — also paints a grim picture.

Congress leaders dismissed Harsh Vardhan’s remarks, asking whether anyone in the government could say confidently that the death data was not being manipulated. In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress has launched a door-to-door campaign to collect the details of Covid victims.

Party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who too tweeted the NYT report, said: “We will never know the true number of Covid-related deaths as the government has worked harder on suppressing this data than they did fighting the pandemic.”

Priyanka has repeatedly accused the Uttar Pradesh administration of suppressing facts. Videos have emerged showing the police cracking down on people intent on telling chief minister Yogi Adityanath the real story of death and destruction.

The world saw images of “vultures on the ground” when videos widely shared on social media showed workers removing the coloured shrouds of bodies buried on Uttar Pradesh riverbanks to allegedly erase visual evidence.

Priyanka posted the video with this comment: “They didn’t get treatment when alive…. Now Ram-nami (covering cloth) is being snatched from the graves.”