Actually no, it doesn't sound like dictatorship - an elected prime minister making decisions seems the right thing, generally. You would think this is the first time a government pressured an RBI governor. I should add that he wasn't kicked out - his term was not renewed.

What did look like dictatorship to me was a prince tearing up a government ordinance and the poor PM running around trying to appease him. Or a queen pulling strings from behind with her own unaccountable "cabinet" - the NAC. Or the parcelling out of government departments among partners to loot the country. That is as low as it can get.

It sounds exactly like a dictatorship. A prime minister with little to no economic knowledge (heck he doesn't even have an undergraduate degree) making a far reaching policy decision on the advice of a charlatan economist along with a few cronies, while keeping the MIT educated central bank chief in the dark.

I am a great fan of Raghuram Rajan, and used to be one of Manmohan Singh as well. But Manmohan Singh's reign as PM can only be counted as an unmitigated disaster, his economic credentials notwithstanding.

The huge NPA crisis that you see now happened under his watch. The Air India deal, the 2G scam etc etc. It is conveniently forgotten for example, that under Manmohan Singh in 2010 the congress government declared that more bank licenses will be given out, flatly contradicting the RBI whose job it is to issue these licenses.

By the standards we are holding this government to, almost any government prior to this would be called a dictatorship.

As bad as those scams may have been, the amount of suffering brought on to the general public by demonetization was several orders of magnitude higher.