Congress lost Lok Sabha elections because Rahul Gandhi does not do yoga: Baba Ramdev

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev is in preparation mode to celebrate International Yoga Day on June 21. He has claimed that those who do yoga, see acche din.

Ramdev praised PM Modi for popularising yoga but not before taking a dig at the Gandhi family.

He, in fact, attributed Congress's drubbing in the Lok Sabha polls to party president Rahul Gandhi not practising yoga.

He said, "Modi ji publicly yog karte hai. Luke chupe Nehruji aur Indiraji yog karte the. Unke aane wale pidi ne yog nahi kiya isliye unki rajniti gadbad ho gayi. Yog karne walo ke acche din aate hai (Modi ji does yoga publicly. [Jawaharlal] Nehru and Indira [Gandhi] used to do yoga surreptitiously. But their successor [Rahul} did not do yoga, which is why his politics went haywire. Those who do yoga, see acche din)."

However, Ramdev's statement seems to be in contrast with what he had said a year ago. Speaking at a television channel event to celebrate yoga, Ramdev had said, "Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi practice yoga regularly. Rahul and I are on friendly terms."

PM Modi is known as a yoga enthusiast and had last year released a nearly two-minute-long video of him doing yoga on the lawns of his Lok Kalyan Marg home. The video which went viral was part of a fitness challenge.

Amid praise as well as trolling of PM Modi's video, some netizens found the opportunity to compare India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi on yet another parameter -- fitness.

Many shared pictures of Jawaharlal Nehru doing the sirsasana (headstand), a very difficult yoga posture. Speaking about the benefit of the posture, Nehru wrote in his autobiography, "The slightly comic position increased my good humour and made me a little more tolerant of life's vagaries."