NEW DELHI: Asserting that India was on the path of progress under PM Narendra Modi’s leadership, BJP Thursday cited govt data to accuse Congress’s Rahul Gandhi of misleading people on the issue of employment and govt policies.

At a presser, party’s national spokesperson Syed Zafar Islam said about 12.5 crore jobs were created in the last 10 years and the latest RBI report, released recently, showed creation of “5 crore jobs in 2023-24 alone”.

“This is a record in itself in the entire world. India is the most successful country in the world in job creation due to the strong leadership of PM Modi,” Islam said.

This comes a day after Rahul said the youth of the country were completely demoralised by unemployment and claimed that their future was in “limbo” due to BJP’s “anti-education mindset”.

“Rahul Gandhi, who insulted Hindus, has started following the religion of falsehood. He and others from opposition are misleading people by spreading lies,” he said.

The BJP functionary said Rahul and other opposition leaders may be claiming that there was unemployment in the country and jobs were not being created but the world didn’t say so. Multilateral institutions like World Bank and International Monetary Fund were saying inflation was under control and the country topped in job creation, he added.

Islam said Congress-led UPA govt, under “an economist” PM Manmohan Singh, had created just 2.9 crore jobs in its 10-year term. “Unemployment rate, which was at 6% in 2017, has now come down to 3.2%,” he added.

Data released by RBI earlier this week indicated that India added = 4.7 crore jobs in 2023-24, taking the total number of employed people to 64.3 crore spread over 27 sectors covering the entire economy.