When the former “president” of the one-man Janata Party was inducted into the BJP in 2013 and then elevated to the position of a Rajya Sabha member last month, the party’s ostensible purpose was apparently to enable him to needle Sonia Gandhi from his privileged position as an M.P.

Earlier, he had engaged in odd jobs like defending the disgraced Asaram Bapu, probably because no respectable saffronite was willing to do so, and calling for the building of the Ram temple about which the party is somewhat wary at the moment.

His present assignment is targeting Sonia Gandhi on the National Herald and Agusta helicopter issues. However, since parliament is in recess, the maverick M.P. has taken upon himself the task of seeking Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan’s ouster, writing two letters in quick succession to the prime minister, alleging that the reputed banker’s heart is not wholly in India – unlike those of the common or garden variety Ramzadas – and that the government “employee” is working at the behest of the US multinationals to destroy Indian small and medium enterprises.

As he swivels his gunsights on to Rajan, Sonia Gandhi has been relegated to the sidelines for the time being, suggesting that the gadfly has been chosen to focus on different targets at different times. Considering that finance minister Arun Jaitley’s disapproval of Swamy’s antics on the grounds that he is against personal attacks has not dissuaded the new M.P., it is obvious that he has powerful backers.

Among them can be counted Narendra Modi himself since he told the Wall Street Journal that Rajan’s case is an administrative matter and cannot be of any interest to the media. Given that Modi doesn’t address any press conferences at all, it is possible that he believes that all issues are outside the media’s purview.

But what is of immediate interest is whether the Modi government is genuinely annoyed with Rajan - perhaps for calling India the one-eyed king in a land of the blind – or because he remains one of the few institutional heads who hasn’t been chosen by the RSS such as the heads of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) or the National Book Trust or the censor board or the film and television institute.

Whatever the reason – perhaps the perception that the economist appears too Westernized in a land where the old saffron motto of Hindi-Hindu-Hindusthan is favoured – the Rajan-Swamy spat is yet another instance of the hiatus between Modi’s development agenda and the rule of the Hindutva Gestapo.

Some of the saffron hawks like Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj have indeed been tamed, but if others like Swamy have been let loose, the reason apparently is that the Modi dispensation wants to emphasize its distinctiveness not only from those who were in power earlier – Rajan was appointed by the Manmohan Singh government - but also those whose preferences do not tally with the saffron camp’s.

Rajan is one of the favourites of the media, especially the “pink papers”, and also of India Inc. The latter have already voiced their disquiet about the criticism of Rajan. One of them, Adi Godrej, also said that bans on beef and measure like prohibition are detrimental to economic growth. Rajan once said that it is essential for the extreme left and the extreme right to desist from saying that they will “shut you off if you don’t say what I want to hear”.

None of this will be music to the BJP’s ears. But its problem is that there is no saffron economist of stature who can replace Rajan just as there wasn’t for the post of the head of the ICHR, for which the “unknown” Y. Sudarshan Rao was chosen.

It will not do, however, to select an unknown economist to head the Reserve Bank at a time when the economy is not taking off and no one has been able to explain to Modi what the phrase, “big bang” reforms, means, as he told the Wall Street Journal.

The value of a maverick lies in his ability to be politically incorrect when the party feels it necessary to set the compass in what it believes is the right direction but is chary of making the adjustment itself. The need has arisen even in a supposedly disciplined party like the BJP because the square shape of its pro-Hindu agenda does not fit into the round hole of secularism, which is still the credo of the Indian state.

In taking on Rajan, however, Swamy may have exceeded his brief because the former’s presence in the Reserve Bank sends the right message to the corporate world. It would be better, therefore, for Swamy to stick to pseudo-religious issue like the Ram temple. (IPA Service)