New Delhi, May 19 (IANS) : The Congress on Wednesday said the demand for RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan’s removal could be connected with the central bank’s stand on disclosure of names of all willful loan defaulters and questioned the prime minister’s silence on the issue.

“Does the attack have to do with the drive to get public sector banks to declare the quantum of non-performing assets so that the extent of the rot can be exposed,” Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said.

“... an institutional decision has been taken to hound out the Reserve Bank of India’s governor. Why is the prime minister silent? Why has Narendra Modi not come out and spoken on the attack on the governor of the central bank; that is unprecedented.”

Earlier this week, BJP’s newly nominated Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to remove Rajan with immediate effect, saying “he is mentally not fully Indian”.

The Congress leader said that the government’s silence on the matter is deafening.

“There is an obvious complicity in that silence. Or there could be another angle: While somebody is taking aim at the RBI governor, the real target could be the finance minister (Arun Jaitley).”

“The attack on RBI governor is not an attack on an individual. It is perhaps the most vicious assault on institutional mechanism in India in the last 67 years. No country can function without institutions,” he added.