Congress Accuses Centre Of Masking High-Voltage Inflation Shock Via Economic Data Jugglery

The Congress party on Tuesday accused the Modi government of misleading the people through "statistical jugglery," while delivering what it called a "high-voltage shock" of rising prices to the country. Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh led the attack, alleging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is "preoccupied with generating fake headlines" and has even taken away the common person's dream of building a home, in a fresh escalation of the party's ongoing criticism of the government's handling of inflation across multiple sectors of the economy.

"The Modi government is delivering a fresh, high-voltage shock of rising prices to the country every week," Ramesh said in a post in Hindi on X, framing the latest price increases as part of a recurring pattern rather than an isolated or temporary spike. He argued that inflation is no longer confined to the kitchen, with the poor and middle class now feeling the painful "electric shock" of rising costs across sectors ranging from home construction to electrical goods, a shift he said marked a troubling broadening of the inflationary pressures facing Indian households.

To support his claims, Ramesh cited a media report detailing sharp increases in the price of key construction materials, saying the price of copper wire had surged from Rs 850 to Rs 1,700 per kilogram, while aluminum had risen from Rs 350 to Rs 650 per kilogram over a comparable period. He said the cumulative effect of these increases had roughly doubled the cost of wiring a 1,000-square-foot house, from around Rs 50,000 to nearly Rs 1 lakh, a jump he described as placing homeownership further out of reach for ordinary families already struggling with tightening household budgets and stagnant wage growth.

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This is not the first time Ramesh has targeted the government over rising prices. In recent weeks, the Congress leader has repeatedly highlighted increases in the cost of everyday essentials, previously pointing to sharp jumps in the prices of flour, rice, cumin, turmeric, cooking oils and sugar, and describing the cumulative impact as having "broken the back" of the common man. In one earlier post, he had noted that flour prices had climbed from Rs 32 to Rs 40 per kilogram and rice from Rs 42 to Rs 54 per kilogram within the span of a month, alongside steep increases in spice prices, arguing that the burden extended well beyond the kitchen to items such as soap, detergent, toothpaste and even tires and cars.

Ramesh has also criticized the government in the past over rising wholesale and retail inflation figures, at one point noting that wholesale inflation had reached a 44-month high alongside a sharp increase in fuel and electricity prices, which he described as evidence of the administration's broader economic mismanagement. He has separately accused the government of manipulating the Consumer Price Index and Wholesale Price Index to project an artificially favorable picture of inflation, while alleging that a similarly opaque approach was taken in constructing poverty metrics used to claim reductions in poverty levels nationally.

Ramesh's latest remarks reflect a consistent line of attack the Congress party has pursued throughout the year, accusing the Modi government of prioritizing favorable data presentation and public messaging over addressing the substantive economic hardship faced by ordinary households. The party has repeatedly called on the central government to acknowledge the scale of price increases across both food and non-food categories and to take concrete steps to ease the burden on the middle class and the poor, arguing that rising costs of essential materials like copper and aluminum threaten to undercut government initiatives aimed at promoting affordable housing. As of Tuesday, the government had not issued a detailed response to Ramesh's specific allegations regarding construction material costs, though officials have in the past pushed back against similar Congress claims by citing official inflation data and pointing to broader economic growth figures as evidence of the economy's overall resilience.

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