Dialogue of the Deaf: The Government and the RBI
Central Banks are much like what Voltaire once said about god — if he did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him. When the times are good, they are taken for granted; when things go wrong, they are prayed to. Like god, central banks also move in mysterious ways: it is hard to tell how much of what they do has economic substance and how much is purely political.
Dialogue of the Deaf is the history of the politics of monetary policy in India. The workings of the Reserve Bank of India and its strange relationship with the government forms the core of the book. It is forever walking the tightrope, torn between the law that governs it and the politics of the governments that control it. Or, as was famously said by the Governor of the Bank of England when it was being set up, it has to play the role of a ‘Hindoo wife' who offers advice but never asserts herself.
In this easy-to-grasp book, T. C. A. Srinivasa Raghavan has described some of the main elements of this complex relationship with facts, anecdotes and analysis stretching back to nearly 180 years in a manner easily accessible to the lay reader who wants to get a sense of the workings of money, monetary policy and the men who control it in India.
