The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Sambit Patra, who is also the party’s contestant for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections from Puri, Odisha, created a wave of criticism against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Ujjwala programme, under which the Union government claims to have provided over 51 million—51,407,565 at last official count—free connections of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), distributed in standard-sized cylinders familiar to most people in India. Patra had tweeted a video of himself eating food at a home, while an older woman in the background cooked on a chulha, a traditional earthen hearth that uses firewood or other natural combustibles. Twitter users used the video to point out that the government had failed to deliver an LPG connection to the woman. “Who says the old woman did not receive a connection under Ujjwala? She told us that her daughter-in-law cooks on LPG…,” Patra later claimed, while sharing another video of the woman.
