Letters: The gracious Rama Rau

This refers to the article "The uneasy relationship" (A new milestone at Mint Road, April 2) wherein T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan tells that Benegal Rama Rau resigned as Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor since Jawaharlal Nehru declined to support him in his public spat with T T Krishnamachari, the then finance minister.

Rama Rau had resigned in January 1957 after an exchange of a series of letters between him and Nehru in one of which Rama Rau said that he was "puzzled and pained by the tone and contents of your letter". Nehru, however, was unmoved and the correspondence at his end, ended with the terse sentence: "If you wish you can send your formal resignation to the Finance Ministry." Rama Rau resigned without giving any reason for his resignation.

After this, whenever he was asked by media persons and others about the reason, Rama Rau declined to say a word. The facts in this regard got publicly known only 40 years later in 1998, when the RBI published volume-II of its history covering the years 1951-67; both Nehru and Rama Rau had passed away much earlier.

In between these years, I happened to be present at the Independence Day function on August 15, 1964, in a residential colony of the RBI, where the residents had invited Rama Rau as chief guest. Nehru had died a few months earlier. The people gathered around Rama Rau, pressing him that it was an occasion for him to reveal the seven-year-old untold story behind his resignation. Rama Rau smiled and started his address by saying that "it is an occasion for remembering the great men who brought this day in our lives and the two greatest among them were Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru."

R C Mody New Delhi

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