If lockdown not solution, then why states with Congress in power extended it first: BJP

New Delhi: Taking a swipe at Rahul Gandhi over his statement that lockdown is not a solution to containing coronavirus, the BJP on Thursday asked the Congress as to why states, where his party is in power, extended it before the central government did so.

"Lockdown is not the solution acc to @RahulGandhi. Then why did the CMs of @INCIndia Cong partnered govts extend the lockdown first? (sic)," BJP general secretary (organisation) B L Santhosh tweeted.

Maharashtra, where the Congress is part of the government, has backed lockdown, with the state dispensation extending it to April 30 before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement on April 14 to stretch it nation-wide till May 3.

Punjab, where the Congress is in power, had also extended the lockdown before Modi's announcement.

Modi had said that most chief ministers favoured lockdown to combat the pandemic.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi earlier strongly pitched for aggressively expanding coronavirus testing across the country and adopting it as a "strategic" instrument to "defeat" the pandemic.

He said the lockdown is not a solution to the pandemic, and the time must be utilised to significantly bolster the existing medical infrastructure as well as take steps to deal with the worrying economic fallout.

From its Twitter handle, the BJP also put out data to assert that India has managed to "significantly contain" COVID-19 as compared to other severely hit countries, at just nine cases per one million of population and 0.

3 deaths per one million population.

At the benchmark of 12,000 positive corona cases the pace of spread in India has been consistently much slower than other countries which have been severely hit, it added.