Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Uttar Pradesh’s Bairia constituency Surendra Singh on Friday said that Chief Minister Adityanath’s experiment to control the pandemic with the help of the bureaucracy has failed, PTI reported.

Singh made the comment while speaking to reporters at his home on Friday. He added that the fact that BJP ministers and MLAs were getting infected with the virus and were unable to get proper treatment should be considered as a shortcoming of the system in the state.

“The system should be centred around elected public representatives and not the bureaucracy,” Singh said.

Singh has had a notorious record of making insensitive comments. Amid the outrage over the gangrape and death of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras, he had said parents of young women should inculcate good values in them to stop incidents of rape. Singh has also defended Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. On a separate occasion, he had said that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee should become the prime minister of Bangladesh if she protects infiltrators.

Meanwhile, his comment on the pandemic situation in Uttar Pradesh came amid a surge in cases of coronavirus in the state which has been recording over 30,000 infections on a daily basis. The state has also reduced the number of tests conducted in the last few days, as the count reduced from 2.29 lakh samples on April 25, to 1.84 lakh on April 27, The Indian Express reported. As a result, the number of cases also reduced from the highest single-day rise of 38,055 on April 24, to around 30,000 on April 28. The positivity rate in Uttar Pradesh is around 18%.

Noting that the pandemic situation in the state had become “very chaotic”, the Allahabad High Court on Tuesday issued orders for judicial officers to be appointed as nodal officers in nine worst-hit districts. Besides, it also issued a notice to the state election commission on the reported death of 135 polling officers due to coronavirus during panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh.

Further, the court urged the Adityanath-led state government to impose a two-week lockdown in the state to curb the rise in coronavirus cases. On April 19, the Allahabad High Court had ordered imposition of lockdown in the five cities of Lucknow, Varanasi, Prayagraj, Kanpur and Gorakhpur. However, the verdict was put on stay by the Supreme Court after the state government challenged it.