Kolkata: Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his heavyweight cabinet colleague Arun Jaitley, outspoken BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy on Saturday claimed that they do not understand economics. He argued that both often term India as the fifth largest economy while it is the third largest after the US and China according to scientifically acceptable procedures for the GDP calculation. Dr Swamy’s attack on the PM and Mr Jaitley is bound to cause a major embarrassment to the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

“I fail to understand why our PM continues to say India is the fifth largest economy. It is  because he does not have any knowledge of economics. The finance minister also does not know economics,” the BJP leader in his address at the Annual Calcutta Dialogue — Engaging People Republic of China: The View from Eastern India organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Centre for East and North East Regional Studies, Kolkata. Dr Swamy underlined that India is the third largest economy in the world on the purchase power parity which is the right formula to calculate the size of a country’s economy. According to him, India and China were respectively the first and second most prosperous countries once in the world before the colonial forces invasions.