atom.xml generation - Entity 'ldquo' not defined

When I generate pages. An atom.xml is generated with following content at the first line.

<p>&lt;?xml version=&ldquo;1.0&rdquo; encoding=&ldquo;utf-8&rdquo;?>

And when I hit the browser I get an error:

This page contains the following errors: error on line 1 at column 28: Entity 'ldquo' not defined Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

My _config.yml file has this:

 subscribe_rss: /atom.xml
 subscribe_email:
 root: /
 permalink: /blog/:year-:month-:day/:title/
 source: source
 destination: public    
 plugins: plugins
 code_dir: downloads/code
 category_dir: blog/categories
 markdown: rdiscount
 rdiscount:
   extensions:
     - autolink
     - footnotes
     - smart
 highlighter: pygments

I think I am aware that ' chars are changed to ldquo due to rdiscount smart extension. But If thats the case, I should not be getting the error on browser. I am confused. Any help would be great.

If I remove 'smart' extension, then the generated atom.xml does not contain the > , due to which it fails again and throws some other error.