It is hard to believe that Subramanian Swamy was acting as a lone gunman when he launched his attack against RBI chairman Raghuram Rajan. If that were the case, the BJP would have told him to shut up. Instead, it has allowed him to continue. Rajan’s three-year term ends in September and it appears that Swamy’s attack is aimed at smoothening the way to dislodge the immensely popular RBI chairman. Rajan’s fault is that he stood up to the government by not reducing interest rates until inflation had receded to a comfortable level. But he probably severed his links with the Narendra Modi government when he challenged its growth story and famously said, “in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king”. There is no love lost between the Modi government and Rajan but the problem is how does the government give him the boot without drawing criticism and the tag that it wants ‘yes men’ in high positions? This is where Subramanian Swamy comes handy. Swamy courts controversy like no other politician and he is going to step into the shoes of Joseph Goebbels, the infamous propaganda minister in Hitler’s Third Reich who famously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
