Today several media houses reported that former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan slammed Railway minister Piyush Goyal for his comments on the economy yesterday, which turns out to be fake news.
Outlook, Economic Times, ABP News, Quint and several media houses reported today that Rajan had slammed Goyal for his comment. The story sourced from media agency IANS had quoted Rajan as saying, “When you don’t understand the gravity of the economic slowdown, the words stumble and reasoning becomes feeble. If someone thinks that maths doesn’t help understanding gravity and economics, then it’s a sign that you are hiding the actual statistical data. Newton must be smiling”.
The reports with the title “It’s a sign that you’re hiding real data: Rajan on Goyal faux pas” said that Rajan made these comments in a tweet. The comments were supposed to be in response to Goyal’s statement yesterday, when he had urged media not focus on GDP numbers and mathematics of the same too much. To emphasise that mathematics is not important always, he had said that mathematics didn’t help Einstein in discovering gravitation. Piyush Goyal was widely criticised for factual errors in his comment.
But the fact is that no such comment was made by Raghuram Rajam, and the media houses and IANS fell for a parody account. The former RBI governor is not present on Twitter. But there is a parody account in his name, which had tweeted the statement.
The Twitter handle @RaghuramRRajan mentions in its bio that it is an unofficial parody account, posted the following today.
https://twitter.com/RaghuramRRajan/status/1172353862008590336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
It may be noted that earlier media had reported that Raghuram Rajan doesn’t have any Twitter account, and the accounts seen in his name are fake. It is ironical that he had informed IANS via an email that the accounts are false and do not belong to him.
At the time of writing this report, ABP news and Economic Times have deleted the report, but other media houses are still carrying it.
Today Piyush Goyal acknowledged his ‘Einstein’ goof up and said that it was a slip of tongue. He said that mistakes are made by everybody and he is not one of them who is scared of making a mistake.