Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday quoted theoretical physicist Albert Einstein to criticise the government and said the lockdown enforced to contain the coronavirus is proof that the “only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance”.

The party leader, in a tweet, attached a graphic that collated the surge in deaths due to Covid-19 in India with the decline in the country’s economic growth over the months when the nationwide lockdown was in place.

India’s coronavirus cases have registered daily increases in recent weeks, putting it at the fourth place on the list of top 10 worst-hit nations. The country on Monday reported 11,502 new cases and 325 deaths, according to Union health ministry. The total number of cases has now gone up to 3.32 lakh and the toll is at 9,520.

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Gandhi has persistently criticised the government’s handling of the pandemic, asserting that the lockdown had failed to flatten the transmission curve of the coronavirus.

On Saturday, the Congress leader shared some graphs showing the increase in Covid-19 cases during the four phases of the lockdown which ended on May 31. The visuals appeared to show that the curve had not flattened. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Gandhi tweeted. The quote Gandhi used has often been wrongly attributed to Einstein.

The Centre extended the nationwide lockdown in containment zones till June 30, but said that all activities will restart in a phased manner outside of the infection hotspots. Shopping malls, restaurants, hotels and places of worship opened in many states across India on June 8 as part of “Unlock-1”, which focuses on resuming economic activity.

Gandhi in a another tweet last week said that India was “firmly on its way to winning the wrong race”. He called this “a horrific tragedy, resulting from a lethal blend of arrogance and incompetence”.

On June 5, Gandhi had used five graphs to show the Centre that the nationwide lockdown had failed to control the spread of the coronavirus. In a tweet, Gandhi posted an image showing five graphs that depicted how lockdowns in European countries – Italy, Spain, Germany and United Kingdom – had helped to bring down the number of daily cases. He said India had failed to flatten the new-case curve as effectively as other nations had. “This is what a failed lockdown looks like,” he tweeted.