India’s Raghuram Rajan warns against intolerance [subscription required]
Raghuram Rajan, India’s central bank governor, has appealed for tolerance of diverse opinions and challenges to established orthodoxies, warning that India’s long-term economic prospects depend on a climate of intellectual freedom... His words — an unusual departure from his more typical public musings on interest rates, bad debt, delinquent entrepreneurs and the international financial system — come amid a climate of growing intolerance in the south Asian country, and fears that the protection of individual rights is giving way to a strident majoritarianism... Mr Rajan’s call for tolerance comes just days after Moody’s Analytics, the economic research arm of Moody’s Corp, warned that Prime Minister Narendra Modi needed to rein in some of the more rightwing members of his administration lest his promised economic reform agenda be derailed by rising social strife.