The 1980 batch of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers has found a way to claw its way back from retirement to be at the helm of key positions in governance in the last month of 2018. After Sunil Arora, from Rajasthan cadre of the 1980 batch of IAS, became the 23rd boss at Nirvachan Sadan, his batchmate Shaktikanta Das, from Tamil Nadu cadre of IAS, has been appointed the 25th custodian of Mint Street.

While a civil servant heading the Election Commission has been the norm and is seen as inevitable, the appointment of a career bureaucrat as Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor has invited criticism—much of it unfounded, some of it valid. To begin with, there are obvious flaws in the arguments attacking the appointment of an IAS man as the chief of the country’s central bank.

First, the alarmist reaction to the appointment is devoid of historical reasoning. If one looks at the background of all the 25 governors of the 83-year-old RBI, an IAS officer leading Mint Street is by no means an aberration. In fact, it’s the most common profile of the 25 RBI governors till now.

As many as 14 of them have been from the IAS, including five from Indian Civil Service (ICS)—the British period predecessor of IAS. Set up in 1935, RBI has a history of five of its first six governors being drawn from the ICS, including British ICS officer James Braid Taylor and then the first Indian to head RBI, CD Deshmukh—an ICS officer who later became Finance Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet.

With the generation of ICS officers mostly retiring by the 1970s, senior officers from the IAS, which was set up in 1947 and was the successor of ICS, were picked for heading RBI, starting with RN Malhotra in 1985.

Besides the IAS, the other 11 governors were either professional economists like IG Patel, Manmohan Singh or more recently Urjit Patel, or career bankers, and one was even drawn from the RBI’s in-house bureaucracy, while another came from the allied central service Indian Audit and Accounts Service. So, history doesn’t support the surprise at the appointment of an IAS officer as RBI boss.

Second, those questioning the credentials of the new RBI chief to steer the institution—at a crucial juncture of its spat with the government on questions of operational independence—miss a crucial point. It may be precisely for this reason that his appointment can be useful for not only the government but also for calming the troubled waters of government-central bank coordination. As an immediate response to the trust deficit, the move has some advantages.

A long stint in the Finance Ministry would certainly stand him in good stead in being deeply aware of the consultative processes in power corridors of decision-making. In soothing the central bank-government dissonance, such experience would serve the immediate objective of guiding the bank’s regulatory role autonomously but without getting into a confrontationist mode with the government.

One must not lose sight of the fact that in pursuit of policy goals for the economy, all institutions need some synchronisation to the economic vision of the government of the day. The challenge for the RBI stewardship is how to be in sync with that blueprint of the government without sacrificing the essential functions and monetary responsibilities of the central bank. For instance, the immediate tightrope-walking needed to deal with the government’s preference for releasing money from reserves for policy goals or relaxing lending norms for public sector banks to spur economic growth.

While sticking to the institution’s integrity, such delicate handling can benefit administrative exposure to levers of policy coordination. Having spent half of his career in dealing with the financial domain of the government, first in Tamil Nadu and then in the Union government, Das has also served as Secretary, Economic Affairs, before retiring from the IAS. This hands-on experience can be expected to be helpful in dealing with unusual times for RBI-government relations.

Third, while talking of unusual times, it must be remembered that during the two most testing periods faced by the country in the last three decades, the governors steering RBI were from the IAS. S Venkitaramanan, who was RBI governor from December 1990 to December 1992, was at the helm of affairs at the RBI when India found its way out of the balance of payment crisis and embraced economic liberalisation. The initial post-liberalisation period was monitored under his watch. Again in 2008, when India was trying to shield itself from the impact of the global economic crisis, D Subbarao was in charge of the RBI and his tenure ended only in September 2013. To their credit, both civil servants guided the RBI well in challenging times.

In the present context, D Subbarao’s tenure is quite relevant to recall. Despite being a committed defender of the autonomy of the central bank and having fought for it, he didn’t choose to make a spectacle out of his differences with the government. In his tell-all memoir Who Moved My Interest Rate (Penguin, 2017), he talks about the ways in which he made the RBI stand its ground whenever he had serious differences with the then Finance Ministers Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram.

He also talks about his annoyance. It is perhaps his IAS experience that allowed him to not let that affect the RBI and find a middle ground. In recent interviews, Subbarao has been sympathetic to the predicament of Urjit Patel and saw the previous governor’s resignation as a “strong message” to a government trying to intrude into the RBI’s powers. However, one still can’t help speculating that the same situation could have had different resolution with a man of Subbarao’s administrative acumen. Despite differences with the Finance Ministry, he was at Mint Street for five years and retained the institution’s independence.

Fourth, there has been some ill-argued attack on the irrelevance of Das’s academic background in history to his role as RBI governor. This criticism has been poorly framed. Das isn’t heading the RBI because of his history degree but because he cracked the civil services examination 38 years ago with a good enough rank to get into the IAS. Like many civil servants, it’s just possible that he might not have even opted for his university subject to write the civil services examination.

In the past 38 years, he held numerous positions that gave him enough exposure to policymaking and implementation and understanding of governance in the country. The roles he performed were multiple, as is the case with any career bureaucrat, but a major part of it was concerned with financial policies. That gives him a hands-on skill set that generalists in civil services argue in their defence vis-à-vis domain expertise of specialists.

Another route that some civil servants take is to take study leave to pursue specific academic interests or for academically equipping themselves for positions requiring domain knowledge. For instance, Das’s immediate IAS predecessors heading the RBI—YB Reddy and D Subbarao—held doctorate degrees in economics. That, in any sense, doesn’t belittle Das’s relevant hands-on experience in policy formulation and monitoring its execution with an eye for detail.

However, something that Das would surely like to emulate is how both YB  Reddy and D Subbarao worked to uphold the institutional autonomy of the RBI once they left the corridors of bureaucratic power to steer the central bank.

Instead of mocking the irrelevance of his post-graduation in history, the criticism of Das’s appointment should have been framed more broadly as the Centre’s hypocritical stand on promoting expertise vis-à-vis generalists in roles requiring specialisation. In preferring a generalist to head the RBI, the Modi government has undermined even the small reformist initiative it had taken this year by showing a willingness to recruit experts to joint secretary positions in specific ministries or departments. In an earlier piece, this author had reflected on the merits and imperatives of such a move. Das’s appointment is a bad advertisement for even the most basic of civil services reforms—a set of reforms that haven’t found the political willingness in any government to execute. Failure to deliver any of the key civil services reforms has been one of the most striking disappointments with the current regime at South Block.

That’s a larger agenda of reforms that unfortunately seems set to remain unattended in the foreseeable future too. Meanwhile, Shaktikanta Das joins a long list of babus who brought the coordinating edge of civil services to the challenge of monitoring sagacity as the head of the central bank. In doing so, Das would need the tightrope-walking skills with which his IAS predecessors ensured that the RBI’s institutional autonomy doesn’t suffer.