NITI Aayog vice chairman's comment on Rajan 'obnoxious and laughable': Congress

Kumar on Monday had blamed Rajan for slowing down the economy stating that Rajan's policies on non-performing assets (NPAs) led to the slowdown in the economy and not the government's demonetisation drive.

In reaction to the same, Congress MP Rajeev Gowda said, "Rajiv Kumar was also ahead in attacking Raghuram Rajan in his efforts in cleaning up the banking system. The NPA's were being identified by Raghuram Rajan and it is important to identify them. BJP has done a horrible job in not acting early enough and strong enough. Trying to pass the buck and blame on Rajan is just an absolute mistake and it has no credibility or factual basis."

Gowda also talked about the decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) attributing it to the global financial crisis of 2008. He noted that the Congress and the United Progressive Alliance had done a "tremendous job" to revive the nation's economy.

"We had a global financial crisis in 2008 after that every country went through a slowdown. The Congress and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) did a tremendous job in helping to revive India's economy. BJP government came into power at a time when they were able to benefit from the growth that was picking up again. However, there was two body blows to economic growth namely demonetisation and the bad implementation of the GST. These two essentially took away our two per cent of the GDP growth. Now we are slowly inching back to the growth rate that should have been a steady-regular growth rate through the last few years."

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala also reacted to Kumar criticising Rajan and described it "obnoxious and laughable".

"This is called blame game and shifting of the goal post. When UPA demitted power, NPAs were only 2 lakh 83 thousand crore which was controllable but now after 4 years of BJP rule, the NPAs are touching 12 lakh crore. Modi Government has itself given this data through a reply in parliament on 31st July 2018... Demonetisation disaster has led to a drop of 1.5 per cent in GDP causing a loss of two lakh twenty-five thousand crores," Surjewala added.

Surjewala noted that every other businessman is failing other than those few who are supported by the Prime Minister. He also spoke about the relentless fall in the national currency.

"Only a handful industrialist friends of Modi Ji is prospering and every other business is shutting down. Currency is falling, the economy is failing, exports are down and Foreign direct investment (FDI) is at the lowest level," he added.

Meanwhile, Kumar in his defence stated that his comments did not target any individual but the policies that were undertaken.

"My views on GDP’s decline being unrelated to solely demonetisation & having begun way before with stricter norms of NPA by RBI under Mr Rajan R fact-based & self-explanatory but some misleading headlines have coerced me to reiterate that the discussion is on policies, not people," Kumar tweeted out on Monday.