Piyush Goyal returns as Union minister in new avatar as 1st time Lok Sabha member

Mumbai: Piyush Goyal, who handled key ministries, including Commerce and Industry, in the second Modi government, won his debut Lok Sabha poll from the Mumbai North constituency with an impressive vote margin. Goyal, 59, who has been a Rajya Sabha member since 2010, eloquently articulated the government’s position on different occasions during debates on various issues in the Upper House of Parliament. Before the polls, Goyal hit out at the opposition leaders for labelling him an outsider, and said he was born in Mumbai, studied in the H R College and Government Law College, started his Chartered Accountancy practice in Lalbaug and worked as an investment banker on Nepean Sea Road.

“There can be nobody more Mumbaikar than me,” Goyal, who hails from an illustrious political family, told PTI last month.

On Sunday, he again became the Union cabinet minister, this time as a Lok Sabha member.

In the recently-concluded Lok Sabha polls, Goyal won against Congress candidate Bhushan Patil from the Mumbai North seat by a huge margin of 3,57,608 votes, the highest in the state. He is the son of BJP loyalists Ved Prakash Goyal and Chandrakanta Goyal. His father was the minister of shipping in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and a BJP national treasurer, and his mother was a three-term MLA from Matunga in Mumbai. Piyush Goyal was elevated to the cabinet rank in September 2017. He has held the post of BJP’s national treasurer and also headed the party’s communications campaign in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The senior politician, who became leader of the house in Rajya Sabha in 2021, has handled multiple ministries like finance, railways, coal, corporate affairs, commerce, industry and textiles, consumer affairs, food and public distribution.

When Congress MP Rahul Gandhi recently alleged a “biggest stock market scam” worth Rs 30 lakh crore and pointed fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union minister Amit Shah, Piyush Goyal claimed that domestic investors in fact made money while the loss was suffered by foreign investors.

The BJP leader also dismissed as baseless Gandhi’s demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the matter, saying he keeps making useless comments.

Goyal said the Rs 30 lakh crore figure highlighted by Gandhi was a notional amount and did not pertain to trading.