Kiren Rijiju Attacks Congress Over India's GDP Metrics, Citing Their Blind Political Hatred

Union Minister Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday launched a fresh attack on the Congress party, this time over India's latest GDP figures, reigniting an ongoing political clash between the two sides. Rijiju's remarks came in response to a post from the Kerala unit of the Congress, which had questioned the credibility of the government's growth numbers and posted an image of a beer mug depicting the Indian economy as the actual liquid, with the official GDP figures represented merely as fizz on top.

Reacting on X, Rijiju asked whether the Congress party was in a "state of deep intoxication" from "drinking too much beer," or whether its members had become "so swayed by their blind loathing of India's growth that they lost touch with ground reality." His remarks were a direct response to a Kerala Congress post that read, "Nobody believes the fake story anymore. The world can see through the fakery."

The exchange is the latest flashpoint in a broader political dispute over India's Q1 FY2026-27 GDP data, released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, which showed real GDP growth of 7.8%, down from 8.6% in the previous quarter but still exceeding the Reserve Bank of India's forecast of 7% for the period. Officials highlighted strong performances in manufacturing, which grew 9.2%, and services, which expanded 10%, both improvements over the same period a year earlier. Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the growth figures as a "herculean feat," crediting the outcome to the resilience of India's economy despite global disruptions including oil price shocks and supply chain issues tied to conflict in West Asia.

The Congress, however, has repeatedly challenged the government's framing of the data. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh described the quarterly figures as presenting a "Greatly Distorted Picture" of the economy, arguing that the numbers fail to capture weak private investment sentiment and sluggish consumer confidence. He further alleged that the wealth of India's five richest families had grown sharply even as real wages for salaried workers declined.

Separately, Congress spokesperson Salman Soz, a former World Bank economist, said that India's official data no longer commanded the same credibility it once had internationally, contrasting the current environment with a period when, in his experience, India's statistics were rarely questioned in the way China's data has historically been.

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The controversy gained further momentum after former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg questioned the government's headline growth figure, arguing in a television interview that revisions to the previous year's GDP base had inflated the current quarter's reported growth rate, and suggesting an alternative calculation putting real growth closer to 2.6%. The Congress seized on Garg's remarks to accuse the Modi government of "fudging" the data.

The BJP, however, firmly rejected this interpretation, with leaders including Amit Malviya arguing that Garg's calculation misread the official figures. Independent analysts examining the underlying data also concluded that the widely circulated 2.6% figure was not a valid alternative measure of real growth, noting that the government's methodology, based on a consistent GDP series, supported the 7.8% figure cited by officials.

The back-and-forth underscores the increasingly contentious nature of India's economic data debates, with both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress using GDP figures as a political battleground ahead of key state elections. While the underlying statistical dispute remains unresolved in the public discourse, Wednesday's exchange between Rijiju and the Kerala Congress reflects how sharply the rhetoric around the issue has escalated, moving from technical disagreements over data revisions to more personal and pointed political attacks between the two camps.

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