Would you call govt anti-national?: Raghuram Rajan defends Infosys over RSS ‘anti-national’ remark

Rajan cited Centre's initial vaccination drive and the GST rollout, saying that 'people make mistakes'

Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan hit out at remarks referring to Infosys as ‘anti-national’ for recurring glitches in the new tax filing system, asking if the government will also be dubbed ‘anti-national’ for its poor performance in Covid-19 vaccination.

“It just strikes me as completely unproductive. Would you accuse the government of being anti-national for not doing a good job on vaccines initially? You say it is a mistake. And people do make mistakes,” Rajan told NDTV.

Rajan cited the government’s GST rollout, saying that it could have been better. “Learn from those mistakes and don’t use it as a club to roll out your own prejudices,” he said.

The Bengaluru-based company came under a sharp attack from RSS mouthpiece 'Panchajanya' over problems faced by taxpayers in accessing the new portal. The article dubbed the company as 'Unchi Dukan, Phika Pakwaan' (great cry and little wool). It also alleged that Infosys is aligned with "anti-national" forces and as a result messed up the government's Income Tax portal.

Read | Naming & shaming of Infosys and India's fall into a moral abyss

RSS distanced itself from the comments two days after the publication of the article.

Rajan also told NDTV that India shouldn’t read too much into India’s factory output which showed a rebound, saying that it was computed on a low base.

“Certainly on the industrial side, there is a reasonable recovery but again, it differentiates between the goods that are targeted at the richer, upper-middle-class people versus goods that are targeted at poorer people,” he said.

He also added that India’s small and medium businesses are not being supported, saying that a forced formalisation of the economy was taking place.

Rajan critiqued the way state governments are financed and said that the Central government has swallowed up a major chunk of revenue. “India is getting too big to be run exclusively from the Centre. And that too not just from the Centre, but from the Centre within the Centre. This kind of over-centralisation holds us back,” he said.

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