Rahul Gandhi tweets question to PM Modi on price rise, gets math wrong

New Delhi: Shooting off a seventh question at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even as campaigning for elections in Gujarat reached fever pitch, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi committed an embarrassing mathematical faux pax with regard to prices of essential commodities on Tuesday.

Realising his mistake soon after, Rahul deleted the tweet and posted a corrected one.

Directly blaming the Prime Minister for the price rise of essential items like cooking gas, vegetables and fuel, Gandhi aggressively highlighted the difference in rates as they existed in 2014 when general elections were last held, and rates as they exist or prevail now in 2017.

Presenting the data on gas cylinders, Gandhi said that cost of one cylinder in 2014 was Rs 414, whereas in 2017, it had gone up to Rs.742. Thereafter, instead of saying that there had been an increase of 79 percent, the Nehru-Gandhi scion erroneously mentioned it as a 179 percent increase.

That was not all! He followed it up by saying that price of pulses had risen by 177 percent instead of 77 percent, the price of tomatoes had gone up by 285 percent instead of 185 percent, that of onions had gone up by 200 percent instead of 100 percent, that of milk had gone up by 131 percent instead of 31 percent and the price of diesel had gone up by 113 percent instead of 13 percent.

Keeping the Gujarat polls in mind, which presently experts and pundits are saying is running neck-to-neck, Gandhi has been shooting off a series of questions at the Prime Minister and demanding that he give accountable answers to each one of them. The former has also asked the latter to come clean and stop his charade of the BJP and Centre claiming that development has only taken place in Gujarat and in other parts of the country under its direction.