BJP leaders and legislators are attacking Rajan since past one year and the way the BJP government has behaved and treated Rajan is most unfortunate, Mr Azad alleged.
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53-year old Rajan, a former IMF Chief Economist with a reputation to have rightly called the 2008 global financial crisis, yesterday made public his decision against a second term as RBI Governor after his now three-year tenure ends on September 4, 2016.
He also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “withstanding worldwide and media pressure” and for standing his ground and declining a second term to Rajan.
Asserting that it was people like him who made India great, Rahul thanked Rajan for steering the Indian economy in hard times. And India’s economy expanded by 7.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015-16, the fastest of any major economy.
In the letter to colleagues, the former International Monetary Fund chief economist said he believed the bank had delivered on objectives including taming inflation, stabilising the rupee and tackling India’s mountain of bad loans.
The Union government nearly immediately came under attack after the RBI made Rajan’s letter public on its website and Twitter, citing the “significance of the matter”.
“It was Modi who protected him for the longest time but the defense wall collapsed when Rajan entered the no-go zone of politics”, one senior RSS official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I will, of course, constantly be readily available to serve my country when needed”.
Mr. Rajan previously expressed interest in staying on for a second term, but he said in a letter to colleagues that he had reconsidered.
The finance minister tweeted after a delay of more than two hours that he respected Rajan’s decision.
Rajan, who is on leave from the University of Chicago, had faced strident criticism from right-wing members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, including parliament member Subramanian Swamy, who has waged a campaign against his economic policies.
Subramanian Swamy, a legislator from Modi’s government and former Harvard economist, tweeted his delight over the fact that Rajan had made a decision to go back to academia in the United States. Swamy had earlier described Rajan as “mentally not fully Indian as he holds a USA green card”. Rajan pushed for inflation targeting to tackle India’s history of volatile prices, which was then made law by the government past year. The names of former CAG Vinod Rai and economic affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das, former finance secretary Vijay Kelkar, former CCI chairman Ashok Chawla, former CEA Ashok Lahiri and former RBI deputy governor Subir Gokarn are in the hat.
“My recommendation to the government is to appoint a successor as soon as possible”.
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Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who famously predicted the 2008 global financial crisis, is held in high esteem by policymakers and investors at home and overseas for overhauling the way the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) operates.
