More generally, the way to fight inflation, given the inconclusive skirmishes we had had in the recent past, was to signal that we were determined to bring it under control. But we also needed to do it in a way that could be tolerated by the Indian economy, which has many people with minimal cushions against adversity – I felt right from the beginning that doing a ‘Volcker’, that is, raising interest rates so high that demand collapsed, was simply not right for the Indian economy.
