New Delhi: Hitting out at Union Railway and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal for undermining the achievements of Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Saturday said that the economy is in a shambles while the government, instead of improving the economy, is busy 'running a comedy circus'. "BJP leaders are busy undermining the achievements of others instead of doing the work they have been assigned. The man who won the Nobel prize did his work with honesty and then won the award," she said.


"Your (government's) work is to improve the economy and not run a comedy circus," Priyanka Gandhi tweeted. Along with her tweet, she also tagged a media report highlighting that despite offering discounts on vehicles, the automobile sales remained dismal.

Congratulating Abhijit Banerjee, who received the Nobel in Economics earlier this week, Goyal had said, “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.” The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader's comment came after Banerjee, at an event, argued that the Indian economy was doing 'very badly' and it was 'going into a tailspin'.

During his speech, Banerjee had also supported ‘NYAY’, a minimum income scheme proposed by the Congress. The NYAY or Nyuntam Aay Yojana is a minimum income guarantee scheme that headlined the Congress manifesto for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019, earlier this year. The party was routed in the polls.

Goyal while congratulating Banerjee on winning the Nobel at a press conference, said: "You all know what his understanding is. His thinking is totally Left-leaning. He had praised the NYAY scheme effusively, but the people of India totally rejected his thinking."

Last month, Goyal was heavily trolled on the internet over an apparent gaffe in explaining that achieving the target of nearly doubling the size of the economy to $5 trillion should not be looked through the prism of maths. At the meeting of the Board of Trade, he remarked that maths did not help Albert Einstein to discover gravity.

The slip up was not lost on the netizens who quickly took to Twitter to point out that gravity was discovered by Isaac Newton and Einstein is credited for his theory of relativity. Some even made fun of the statement.