Congress accused the fourth estate of playing into the hands of Bharatiya Janta Party and alleged that the media is not showing the truth on Indian economy and presenting a wrong picture as fabricated by the saffron brigade led by their prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
``A big section of the media is presenting a concocted picture of the Indian economy as propagated by Modi & Company and not showing even the official figures presented by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government", alleged former state president, Dr Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who is now national spokesperson of the All India Congress Committee.
Addressing media persons along with MlA, Akhilesh Pratap Singh, here on Tuesday afternoon, Rita Bahuguna said that her Party found majority of media reports as `baised’ and presented with a `malafide’ intention.
``Besides several occasions when lies of Narendra Modi kept flashing on electronic media through-out the day, the side of story presented by Congress hardly found any place", alleged Rita while citing a particular example of press meet of union finance minister, P Chidambaram in New Delhi on Monday, in which she claimed that the media not shown any statistics of economy which showed that UPA government despite of facing worst ever recession world-wide had faired much better than compare to regime of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government.
AICC spokesperson also took on Narendra Modi of Gujrat model and asked media that why they never took pain to see that BJP prime ministerial candidate had removed the statistics of development in his home state from official website as it show the reality behind Modi’s much hyped propaganda of `Gujrat Model’, ``In no field Gujrat was even figured in top three states of the country except for malnutrition etc", claimed Rita Bahuguna Joshi while alleging that a well-planned campaign has been going-on in the media against Congress at behest of BJP particularly Narendra Modi for the reason best known the media persons themselves.
Taking on media further, Rita Bahuguna Joshi said that BJP is champion in marketing `false and baseless claims’ through media. ``In 2004, it was media who write-off Congress and openly shown return of NDA government through `India Shinning’, and again in 2009, every one showed that UPA is going out of power but the truth behind the media hype media campaign exposed when we came with more seats in the Parliament", Rita cited while dumping the pre-poll surveys and opinion polls shown by the media in which everyone making claims of very poor show by UPA in this election. She also accused media of showing the economic statistics of just 2012-13 to criticize UPA government. ``Either take best period of both NDA and UPA government to compare the two on economic front or take average of number of years led by NDA and by UPA and than compare who is better", suggested Rita claiming that UPA government had delivered four times better performance in all front particularly economic front than compare to NDA’s regime. On the rising prices, she claimed that besides economic recession, the rise in prices is also due to Congress increasing minimum support prices of all crops to benefit the farmers and the per capita income had also seen a steep rise in the last one decade. She claimed that state governments are more responsible for rising prices than Centre. When asked that why the prices of petrol reached out of common man’s reach, she claimed that it was due to rising prices of crude oil but she not failed to add that in the NDA’s regime, petrol prices hike was made about 18 times but still no one talk about it and just criticise UPA’s government. Rita also presented economic statistics of last 10-years of rule of UPA and dared media to show and compare it with NDA and tell the public whether it was better than Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s led government or not. She also asked that if the figures given by the UPA government is wrong and fabricated as produced by Narendra Modi & Co than they most also show the truth instead of making them `black-out’ on screen and just doing `Namo-Namo’.