Two days after the Central Information Commission (CIC) asked the Prime Minister’s Office, the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make public the letter of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan on bad loans, the former governor in an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18 on Tuesday, said that the letter sent to the PMO by him in 2015 was of frauds and not of wilful defaulters.

"The list to PMO was of frauds (different from wilful defaulters)," Rajan said.

The CIC, while mentioning the letter in its notice, had called it "a list of high profile fraud cases of non-performing assets.”

Talking to CNBC-TV18 on this issue, information commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu, has said that the CIC wants the government to at least disclose action taken on the information provided by Rajan.

The former RBI governor also talked about the tussle between the Centre and the central bank. Batting for the RBI, Rajan said deputy governor Viral Acharya did not compare India with Argentina, but only highlighted the vulnerability of undermining a central bank.

Raghuram Rajan also said that a lot of "unnecessary noise" has been inserted into the RBI board deliberations in the recent past.

Ghanshyam Tiwari, spokesperson, Samajwadi Party; AK Bhattacharya, editorial director, Business Standard; Sanjay Jha, spokesperson, Congress and Gopal Krishna Agarwal, spokesperson, BJP, discusses the issue.

Agarwal said he would not like to comment what is happening between the CIC and the RBI as those are two independent bodies and their autonomy and independence is equally important for the BJP as well as for the country.

On CIC statement questioning the government action, Agarwal said, the centre has implemented insolvency and bankruptcy code (IBC), NCLT process has been installed and the passing of Benami property act was all part of the action by the government.

Jha said it shows the grave manifestation of the kind of opacity that is there in the government.

"This is a clear attempt to protect certain very high profile people," he said, adding that this is why we continuously keep highlighting the point that there is a lot of crony capitalism in this government.

First Published:Nov 6, 2018 11:21 PM IST