india

Updated: Jul 13, 2020 02:41 IST

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Sunday came out in support of Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, a day after the Nobel winning economist told a television channel on Saturday that he objected to Union Minister Piyush Goyal questioning his professionalism.

“These bigots are blinded by hatred and have no idea what a professional is. You cannot explain it to them, even if you tried for a decade. Please be certain that millions of Indians are proud of your work,” the Congress leader tweeted without mentioning .the BJP or any of its leaders.

On Friday, Goyal said that he did not take Banerjee’s criticism of India’s economic policies and the economic slowdown seriously.

“I first congratulate Banerjee for his Nobel award in economics. But you know his views and ideology. He belongs to Left ideology which has been rejected in India,” Goyal had said

Banerjee, who helped the Congress draft the Nyuntam Aay Yojana or NYAY, a minimum income guarantee scheme which the party’s major poll plank in the Lok Sabha elections, had said that as a professional he would have given the same number to the BJP if it had sought his opinion.

Ahead of Rahul Gandhi backing Banerjee, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had also hit out at Goyal for his remarks and said the government was running a “comedy circus” when the economy is “collapsing”.

Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were named for the Nobel Prize for economics on October 14.

Shortly after the announcement of the Nobel prize, he said the Indian economy was doing “very badly”, citing declining household consumption data and that it was “going into a tailspin”. He also and criticized the government for considering as “wrong” all data that is “inconvenient to it”.