IANS Falsely Attributes Parody Account’s Tweet to Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Rajan did not take a dig at Piyush Goyal for his comments on the economy.
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CLAIM
Several media houses on Friday, 13 September, published a story on former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan's alleged response to a recent statement made by Union Minister Piyush Goyal which credited Einstein instead of Newton for discovering gravity.
News agency IANS ran the original story titled ‘It’s a sign that you’re hiding real data: Rajan on Goyal faux pas.’
The Quint also carried the story, although it was an auto-published version of the copy. Economic Times, Outlook, ABP News and Caravan Daily were the other media outlets which ran the story.
The report said that Rajan "launched a scathing attack on Goyal dissecting every work of his remark and saying that he fails to understand the 'gravity' of economic slowdown."
An archived version of the post can be seen here.
According to IANS, Rajan tweeted, “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.”
An archived version of the tweet can be seen here.
WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
Raghuram Rajan did not take a dig at Piyush Goyal for his comments on the economy. News agency IANS sourced the tweet from an unofficial parody account of the former RBI governor.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
The tweet attributed to Rajan was posted by a parody account. ‘Tweets/RTs are Unofficial parody,’ is clearly mentioned in the bio of the Twitter handle.
Rajan does not have a Twitter account.
It is clear that no such comments were made by Rajan and several media houses fell for a parody account.
Goyal had said that India should not be concerned about gross domestic product (GDP) calculations as shown on TV, as “maths didn't help Einstein discover gravity,”
The commerce and industry minister was widely trolled on social media over the gaffe in explaining that achieving the target of nearly doubling the size of the economy to 5 trillion dollars should not be looked through the prism of maths.
However, Goyal later admitted that he committed a gaffe by crediting the discovery of gravity to Albert Einstein instead of Issac Newton.
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