A premature exit, to India's loss

GIVEN his achievements, a central banker like Raghuram Rajan, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), would have a "guaranteed recomformation" in any country in the world. So wrote Luigi Zingales, Mr Rajan's colleague at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, to which Mr Rajan will return upon completing his single term at the RBI on Sept 4.

Mr Zingales is probably right. As he noted, Mr Rajan's headline achievements are staggering: he brought down inflation from more than 10 per cent to 5.5 per cent while simultaneously enabling an increase in economic growth from 5 per cent to almost 8 per cent - and within three years too.

He suggested that that Mr Rajan, who was cleaning up India's banking system, fell victim to the forces of crony capitalism, or, as Mohammed El-Erian, another distinguished economist and chief economic adviser at Allianz, put it in a tweet: "Here's another instance of messy pol…