Meet the decision makers who steered India through the Lehman crisis

D Subbarao, C B Bhave and Montek Singh Ahluwalia worked with P Chidambaram and Manmohan Singh to ensure India came out unscathed from the global crisis

Palaniappan Chidambaram has been acknowledged by D Subbarao to have pushed the latter’s candidature as Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor in September 2008. But his term ended perhaps with less warmth than it started. The beginning of a frosty relationship between the two can be traced back to the financial crisis when Chidambaram constituted a liquidity management committee and asked the central bank to nominate a representative.

This was seen to intrude into the territory of the RBI, noted Subbarao in his book Who Moved My Interest Rate? The disagreement between the two came in the early days of Subbarao’s