Piyush Goyal's Newton-Einstein gaffe: Twitterati mocks 'new Pappu'; Union minister's justification hardly helps

Einstein and Newton were among the top trends on Twitter on Thursday, and the reason had little to do with their contributions to science, and more with Union minister Piyush Goyal’s gaffe at a board of trade meeting on Wednesday.

“Don’t get into the calculations that you see on the television that if we’re looking at a $5 trillion economy, the country will have to grow at 12 percent… Don’t get into those maths. Maths never helped Einstein discover gravity,” he told the attendees of the meeting.

His remark crediting Einstein for Newton’s discovery didn’t go unnoticed by netizens. Twitterati massively trolled Goyal for the comment, which came days after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman sparked a controversy by claiming the “millenial mindset” was behind the slowdown in the auto industry.

As a result, memes and jokes on Goyal and the NDA government surfaced in no time.

 

 

Congress and few other Opposition leaders were among those who lashed out at Goyal for the goof-up. Congress sought to correct Goyal on Twitter, while also reminding him that the knowledge of mathematics was required to fix the economy. Recent official data on economy had revealed that the GDP growth had seen a six-year-low at 5 percent for the April-June quarter.

Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh mocked the Narendra Modi government for its ministers, while party spokesperson Sanjay Jha joked that Goyal also thinks Bollywood actor Rajkumar Rao – who acted in the film called Newton – discovered the three laws of motion.

AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted a “made up” version of Einstein’s theory of relativity and wrote, “State of economy is proportional to how much a mantri relies on math and knows about science”. He also took a dig at the Centre and said the Modi government can blame the gravitational pull for the “crashing” economy.

Goyal didn’t stay mum on the controversy, and later issued a clarification on his remarks.

“Unfortunately some friends have sought to remove the context, pickup one line and create a very mischievous narrative,” he said.

However, Goyal seemed to be completely unaware about the gaffe and instead went on to explain why he spoke against the dependence on calculations for innovations. “Maths never helped Einstein discover gravity – this line has been misinterpreted. The next line I said is not being added and shown correctly. After this, I said if he had gone only by structured formula and past knowledge, I don’t think there would’ve been any innovation in this world. It is an effort to make the people confident, give them the spirit of positivity. If we live in the past, we will never be able to achieve our goals,” he told ANI, paving way for a fresh round of trolling.