Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday termed Trinamool Congress member Sougata Roy a “male chauvinist” for saying she was “bereft of new ideas” as she did not have a foreign degree.

“From the land of Bengal, which gave us ‘Vande Mataram’, today we have Professor Sougata Roy, who remarked that I’m ‘bereft’ of new ideas because I’m from JNU & not Harvard or Oxford,” she told the Lok Sabha.

“Even the chief minister and finance minister of Bengal have studied from the University of Calcutta. I want to ask him, are they too bereft of ideas? We’re all from Indian Universities and I want to ask him in what way are we less than the Harvards & Oxfords of the world. Even he teaches in an Indian University. He should be ashamed of himself,” she added.

Sitharaman went on to slam Bengal’s economic decline under the Left and the Trinamool rule, leading to huge protests by Trinamool members who later staged a walkout demanding a white paper on the devolution of central funds for welfare schemes, particularly the rural employment guarantee scheme.

“Bengal’s share of the total industrial production of the country, which used to be 24 per cent at the time of Independence, declined to just 3.5 per cent by 2021. There has been a downward trend in gross capital formation. In 2010, Bengal accounted for 6.7 per cent of capital formation in India. Now, it accounts for only 2.9 per cent,” she said.

Roy had said he didn’t expect Sitharaman to be like Dr Manmohan Singh or former finance minister P. Chidambaram with degrees from Oxford and Harvard universities. “She is from our own JNU. But the problem is she is bereft of new ideas,” he had said.