Urjit Patel resigned on December 10, 2018, from the post of Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He served as Governor for more than two years and drove the economy diligently, overseeing the handling of various challenges such as Demonetization, the implementation of GST, the NPA problem, rising crude oil prices and retaining inflation targets. Unlike Raghuram Rajan, the previous Governor of RBI, who spoke rather liberally, Urjit Patel has always been reclusive and took his time to speak on matters whatever they were and as he succeeded the former Governor, in the NDA era, he had always been a target of those who have an interest in projecting the government as totalitarian.
Ever since Modi government came into power, it has been accused of “destroying” institutions by opposition leaders and certain members of the media who have taken it upon themselves the objective to build a malignant narrative around the government’s functioning. Obviously, one of these institutions as been the RBI and the man at the post of governor attracted ruthless coverage linking him with the government, questioning his leadership and his credibility.
There was a time when Urjit Patel was labeled as pliant and a weak leader that bent to the government’s wishes at the expense of the autonomy of institution but today he is being hailed as the man with a “spine” for resigning amid clear differences with the government regarding the sharing of the bank’s surpluses. He was belittled for most of his term by these intellectuals and dolt economists but the current sequence of events make for a better narrative to defame the Modi government even if it means doing a complete 180. Take a look at the comments made by this ‘narrative-hijacking’ mafia over Patel’s resignation.
Rana Ayyub, the perfect person for the job, if the job is painting a dismal picture of everything under the sun in Modi’s India. She certainly did not think very highly of Urjit Patel in 2016, but is now dismayed by his departure; at least for the sake of the anti-Modi government narrative weaved so strenuously over the years.
Congress leader Sanjay Jha had been particularly expressive about his disenchantment with Urjit Patel, urging for his resignation, but when Patel did resign, India, for Mr. Jha, quite conveniently turned into a “banana republic”.
For Shekhar Gupta, Patel had become a joke, an RBI governor who complied with the government undermining his own reputation and that of the RBI’s. Two years later Mr. Gupta sees the resignation as an honourable act.
Rohini Singh, who writes for The Wire and exhibits the same level of hypocrisy as The Wire, too believed that Patel’s leadership was calamitous to the RBI until she didn’t.
The Congress party, ever facing a severe deficiency of real issues to take up, has plenty of times tended to play both sides of the coin, usually clueless. They demanded Patel’s resignation in a classic “Gherao’ Andolan and now they mourn it.
Swati Chaturvedi, with her ultimate known goal to target Modi Government and Arun Jaitley, did not mind doing a u-turn herself. Only thing consistent in her tweets is the aggression.
It will not come as a surprise when Patel is eulogized and hailed as a bureaucrat who fought an invasive regime as the same people who disparaged Mr. Urjit Patel as governor of RBI under Modi government have now found their new blue-eyed-boy in him. He was belittled by them to defame the government and now he shall be extolled and celebrated by them, again, to defame the government. And therefore, if there is any one’s credibility in question here, it is their own.