Posted on: 19-06-16 21:11:52
Most of the RBI Governors have served for only one term even though they have been experts in banking and economics. But it is mysterious why such a hype is created in the media.
More than Rajan going back to Chicago as a green card holder the comments made by India Inc and their beneficiary politicians really make us think that something good has happened to the nation.
The worst was from Infosys Narayana Murthy. Some years back, people were recommending him for Bharat Rathna and even President's post. But his comment that other green card holders "confidence in India" will be affected appears only to poison those special category people's minds. Are all of them yearning for the RBI Governor's post? Can't they contribute for India's betterment, which India is direly in need of, without occupying such posts? That all from India Inc have come out in support of Rajan's continuation and rue his exit only give credence to Swamy's allegations that Rajan had not helped Small and Medium Enterprises.
The second worst was from Chidambaram that "India does not deserve Rajan".
Will Somebody tell Chidambaram that a poor country like India also does not "deserve" a spectrumgate, coalgate, their LSE and Harvard educated spectators if not authors, and their scions' Vadragate and Karthigate if not the scions themselves.
Pray God that the right people support Rajan in his next assignment.
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So what is the real story. Looks like Rajan most perhaps deterred some hidden Agenda.
Well, its something we will come to know sooner or later.
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The cowards never started,
The weak died on the way,
Only the strong arrived.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yK1i9cLAMM
I think Rajan has started becoming very popular across the country, clean hand, educated, visionary.. Nnnnnoooooo... our Modi ji doesn't like any such figure...
OK.. its time to start the game calling, Mmm where to start the name calling....
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The cowards never started,
The weak died on the way,
Only the strong arrived.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yK1i9cLAMM
I am clueless as to what led to what. But here is a small write up that might make sense. The opinions expressed are those of the author of that letter.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160620/jsp/opinion/story_92118.jsp#.V2f13PkrLcu
One of the questions that Raghuram Rajan's exit from the Reserve Bank of India raises is the integrity of the technocrat in ideological regimes. How do you serve a Federal Government without being appropriated by it? If you are part of a government like this one, what is the distance between Sakshi Maharaj or Sanjeev Balyan or Subramanian Swamy and you?
The argument for serving the government of India in a technocratic capacity is a powerful one. A democracy has only one way of determining legitimacy: Which is 'Elections". Narendra Modi won a large mandate fairly. The oft-made point that the National Democratic Alliance won less than 40 per cent of the vote might help us reflect on the nature of pluralities in a first-past-the-post democracy, but it's no reflection on the legitimacy of Modi's government. That being the case, serving as the governor of the Reserve Bank ought to be wholly respectable.
But this was true in the world before Subramanian Swamy. It is clear now (or it ought to be) that this English-speaking extremist is the Anglophone face of the Bharatiya Janata Party. When Swamy joined the BJP in 2013, the media treated him as a kind of court jester, licensed to say outrageous things but not a real force in the new dispensation. It's an assessment that is being rapidly revised; on the evidence of Rajan's termination, Swamy is the party's most influential voice after Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
In late May, Swamy wrote a letter to the prime minister accusing Rajan, amongst other things, of being a 'disruptor' of the economy, of not being 'mentally fully Indian' on account of his green card, and charged him with deliberately and wilfully wrecking the Indian economy. "I cannot see why someone appointed by the UPA Government who is apparently working against Indian economic interests should be kept in this post when we have so many nationalist minded experts available in this country for the RBI governorship." Three weeks after Swamy accused the RBI's governor of being a treacherous, unpatriotic saboteur, the government of India decided not to give him another term.
This is not a coincidence. A month before attacking Rajan, Swamy had been given a nominated berth in the Rajya Sabha. At the time, the journalistic gloss on his appointment was that he would act as a polemical force-multiplier in the Rajya Sabha. Besides, as the driving force behind the National Herald case against the Gandhis, he would be better placed to embarrass the Congress. This was clearly an underestimation of his standing in the BJP. Swamy wasn't in the Rajya Sabha as a useful loose cannon; he was there as its principal ideologue, as the man who could translate its innermost thoughts and ideological attitudes into political English.
When he used his position as a parliamentarian to spit on the governor of the RBI from a great height, the first response of the press was that Swamy was being Swamy. Only he wasn't; we now know that he was explaining on behalf of his government why Rajan wouldn't get the second term that he seemed interested in. Had this not been the case, Swamy's attack on Rajan would have been vigorously repudiated by the government. It's worth recalling its form - it was framed as a letter to the prime minister. Instead we got a tepid, pro forma defence from the finance minister, Arun Jaitley, and radio silence from Modi. The prime minister's silence wasn't surprising. For someone who was mute when Mohammad Akhlaque was lynched, Rajan's discontinuation was unlikely to merit comment; no one died.
The point here isn't Raghuram Rajan's indispensability. India will manage without him in the same way as it weathered the great recession without Rajan at the helm. The point, crudely put, is this: presented with a choice between two economists, this government chose Subramanian Swamy over Raghuram Rajan.
Why would it do this? The answer isn't complicated. Subramanian Swamy is an ideological soul mate. While he is a lateral entrant into the BJP, his sympathy for majoritarian causes is of long standing. He combines a genius for litigation with a real gift for public provocation. He is, like Trump, a great figure on social media. He is an economist with Ivy League credentials. He is, crucially, an English-speaking Hindu majoritarian with a storied, if eccentric, career in politics, and his public profile guarantees attention. He has been saying the unsayable for years, so for a party that wants to let its base know that the respectability of being a governing party hasn't dulled its majoritarian edge, he is a gift. He's like Trump: a provocateur who makes bigotry banal through flamboyant repetition.
His infamous op-ed piece for DNA in July 2011 was the launching pad for his late-career surge. The salient paragraph is worth quoting:
"We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives)."
Commentators who argue that the BJP is a normal political party that has left its Golwalkar-ite past behind it, should re-read this passage and reflect on the extraordinary cachet that Swamy currently enjoys within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP and the NDA. There are only two explanations for Swamy's attack on Rajan and the decision of the government not to offer Rajan an extension. Swamy is either ventriloquizing for the government or he is making the running and the government is following his lead. Either scenario puts him front and centre in the councils of the BJP and its government. More and more he seems like Modi's uninhibited alter ego, someone who can be freely majoritarian in a way that is forestalled by the optics of prime ministerial office. In his new avatar, Modi is unlikely to produce a zinger like 'hum paanch, hamare pachees', but Swamy suffers from no such constraints. He can and will provoke, with relish, in English.
One reason why right-of-centre commentary has been broadly critical of the decision to let Rajan go is that his global standing as an economist supplied an alibi to conservative pundits supportive of Modi. Rajan became a proxy for this government's commitment to economic rationality. Rational economics was a fig leaf that helped obscure a darker politics; Rajan's departure leaves the government (and, by implication, its supporters) a little more naked than before. Swamy's extremism can no longer be tidied away as noise from the fringe. He isn't a gadfly; he is this government's grinning ?minence grise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89minence_grise
FH.
Quote:
Originally posted by Full House
His infamous op-ed piece for DNA in July 2011 was the launching pad for his late-career surge. The salient paragraph is worth quoting:
"We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives)."
Commentators who argue that the BJP is a normal political party that has left its Golwalkar-ite past behind it, should re-read this passage and reflect on the extraordinary cachet that Swamy currently enjoys within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP and the NDA. There are only two explanations for Swamy's attack on Rajan and the decision of the government not to offer Rajan an extension. Swamy is either ventriloquizing for the government or he is making the running and the government is following his lead. Either scenario puts him front and centre in the councils of the BJP and its government. More and more he seems like Modi's uninhibited alter ego, someone who can be freely majoritarian in a way that is forestalled by the optics of prime ministerial office. In his new avatar, Modi is unlikely to produce a zinger like 'hum paanch, hamare pachees', but Swamy suffers from no such constraints. He can and will provoke, with relish, in English.
FH.
The above two paras stand out, and the writer did hit a nail with the above.
Nothing more, or less to comment. The above summarized it well.
Why do parties hate such Bureaucrats? Because of this:
http://qz.com/248685/raghuram-rajan-explains-why-corrupt-politicians-win-elections-in-india/
"The poor and the under-privileged need the politician to help them get jobs and public services. The crooked politician needs the businessman to provide the funds that allow him to supply patronage to the poor and fight elections. The corrupt businessman needs the crooked politician to get public resources and contracts cheaply. And the politician needs the votes of the poor and the underprivileged. Every constituency is tied to the other in a cycle of dependence, which ensures that the status quo prevails. Well-meaning political leaders and governments have tried, and are trying, to break this vicious cycle. How do we get more politicians to move from ?fixing? the system to reforming the system? The obvious answer is to either improve the quality of public services or reduce the public?s dependence on them. Both approaches are necessary. But then how does one improve the quality of public services? The typical answer has been to increase the resources devoted to the service, and to change how it is managed. A number of worthwhile efforts are underway to improve the quality of public education and healthcare. But if resources leak or public servants are not motivated, which is likely in the worst governed states, these interventions are not very effective."
Seems to have diverted towards Subramanian Swamy than on Rajan. We can have a separate discussion on how good or how bad Swamy is, since he is more controversial figure.
Firstly, it was not as if Rajan was plucked out of no where to be the RBI Governor. He was associated with the UPA government in various capacities like Planning Commission etc. even as early as 2007.
Most likely Rajan might have been brought in by MMS and Chidambaram's LSE and Harvard schools' economic brain storming. Just like MMS and PC, Rajan too must have had at least sub-conscious loyalty towards Sonia Gandhi family. When Modi came to power Rajan could have bowed to people' verdict and stuck to his profession only. But he did take pot shots at Modi's government, when he joined the "intolerance" chorus or calling Modi "one eyed king", probably hang-over of earlier loyalties. Must appreciate that Modi or Jaitley did not ask him to resign but took whatever advice Rajan had oferred.
People of the country had great hopes on MMS and Chidambaram because of their LSE and Harvard education. But we were terribly disappointed that it neither had given them the required economics wisdom to solve country;s problems nor the moral strength to stand up against scams like 2G and Coalgate.
MMS himself called their inability as "Coalition Compulsions".
When this is the situation, it is only natural just as LSE and Harvard, Rajan's IIT Kharagpur, MIT and Wharton credentials too come under the scanner. But big business people like Infosys Narayan Murthy add big value for these and asked for Rajan's continuation. People from Small and Medium Enterprises do not care for big education. They always look at it with suspicion, since the highly educated take big salaries and with their Utopian ideas may push those enterprises into the red. Only natural that Rajan favored only the former gas guzzlers and white elephants share market people. But it is the SMEs from places like Surat, Ludhiana, Tirupur, Namakkal and Sivakasi which are engine drivers of India's economy.
Experts in India say that Rajan's many decisions as RBI Chief may be applauded by his probable future employer in USA since he is green card holder. But would it have done good to India and isn't there a conflict of interest.
When asked to name the bad loan defaulters who had robbed banks of lakhs of crores, Rajan compares them with a salaried middle class person who paid his credit card monthly due delayed by one day. NPA of our banks is spreading like cancer while the latter is like a common cold. And Rajan does not know the difference between the two even after serving a full term as RBI Governor. Better he catches the first flight to USA.
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