Union minister of Commerce and Industries Piyush Goyal on Friday dubbed Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel for Economics, as Left-leaning and that he had supported Congress’ ‘NYAY’ scheme and that “people of India rejected his ideology.”

Goyal made the remarks at a media briefing held at Pune where he went to campaign for BJP for the upcoming Assembly elections. He also held meeting with city traders listening to their concerns about the GST.

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“I congratulate Abhijit Banerjee for winning the Nobel prize. You all know that his thinking is totally Left-leaning,” Goyal said.

“Banerjee supported ‘NYAY’ (poverty alleviation scheme of Congress) and people of India rejected his ideology,” the BJP leader said.

Banerjee had recently said that the Indian economy is on a shaky ground, adding that data currently available does not hold any assurance for the country’s economic revival anytime soon. He further said that “policies are evaluated based on accepted criteria and looked at as an option”.

Banerjee said,“The economy is doing very badly in my view,” at a press conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after winning the prize. When asked about his opinion on the state of the economy in India and its future, he said, “That’s a statement not about what will work in the future but about what’s going on now. That I’m entitled to have an opinion about.”

Earlier, on October 14 former Congress president Rahul Gandhi took a dig at the Modi government over its economic policies, saying “Modinomics” was destroying the country’s economy. He made the remark in a tweet he put out to congratulate Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee for winning the Economics Nobel prize.

On October 14, Gandhi tweeted, “Congratulations to #AbhijitBanerjee on winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Abhijit helped conceptualise NYAY that had the power to destroy poverty and boost the Indian economy. Instead we now have Modinomics, that’s destroying the economy and boosting poverty.”

Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo, both working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Harvard University professor Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on October 14 “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

The Swedish Academy of sciences awarded the Nobel Prize to the three for their research which, “has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.”