Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has stepped in to put an end to the controversy, sparked off by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy with a letter, >containing disparaging remarks about Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Seeking to “pour cold water” over the issue, the Minister had a word with the members of the BJP upset with Dr. Rajan for his bhashanbaji (rhetoric).
While concurring with members’ rejection of the Governor’s outspokenness, the Minister explained to them that Dr. Rajan was “very bright.” A top BJP source told The Hindu that the members expressed annoyance over Dr. Rajan’s selective criticism. “The members complained that he never criticised anything during the previous UPA Government’s tenure,” the source said.
Mr. Jaitley also cited examples of U.S. Federal Reserve’s head Janet Yellen and its earlier chair Alan Greenspan and emphasised that no other central bank governor in the world was as outspoken as Dr. Rajan.
Earlier, speaking at an event organised by Indian Women’s Press Corps, the Finance Minister had said: “As far as the Finance Ministry and the RBI are concerned, there is an institutional relationship between the two... a very mature relationship…at the highest level the two institutions have discussion and each other’s views are considered between us.”
Swamy sought his ouster Dr. Swamy, newly nominated to the Rajya Sabha, raised a storm earlier this week when he announced he had written to the Prime Minister seeking that the RBI Governor be sacked. “The reason why I recommend this is that I am shocked by the wilful and apparently deliberate attempt by Rajan to wreck the Indian economy… These actions of Rajan lead me to believe that he is acting more as a disrupter of the Indian economy,” he wrote in the two-page letter.
