Reporting & Essays Profile The Outlier The inscrutable politics of Subramanian Swamy By SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN Published :1 May 2012 Text Size Print this page Email this page Add to favourites Share with friends Single page NISHANT SHUKLA FOR THE CARAVAN ONE T O SEE SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY in his natural habitat is emphatically not to se e him thus: in the heart of a throng of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker s, on a January morning, in the town of Dhar, in Madhya Pradesh. Mere minutes af ter Swamy, the president and, frankly, the totality of the Janata Party, hopped out of an SUV, he was swallowed by the crowd. Somewhere within its crevices, he was inserted into a massive garland, and a vivid red tilak was smeared across his fo rehead like an angry wound. Then he reappeared atop a jalopy that had been conve rted, with the judicious aid of a silvered backboard, silvered side panels and a cloth-covered bench, into a motorised chariot. The crowd disciplined itself int o a column and began to trickle through the streets of Dhar. A small boy sat sid eways next to the driver of the chariot and gaped unceasingly at Swamy. Even in late January, Dhar had grown decidedly hot by 10 am, and Swamy looked uncomforta ble and hassled. Late the previous night, standing near a baggage carousel at the Mumbai airport, Swamy had explained to me why we were headed to Dhar. A small delegation from t he town had visited him in Delhi in early 2010 to ask if he would take up the ca se of the absent Vagdevi Saraswati, a striking 11th-century stone idol that had been transported, just over 100 years ago, from a Dhar temple to the British Mus eum in London. The idol used to occupy a temple within the Bhojashala, a school built by Bhoj, king of Malwa, around the year 1034 AD. I got so busy with the 2G case, but these guys didn t let me forget about it, Swamy said. And every Basant Pan chami, they have this big rally in Dhar, so that s where we re going. I m kind of a ch ief guest there. The Basant Panchami rally every spring has, for a couple of decades now, thrumme d with communal tension. On the grounds of the Bhojashala is a dargah, also seve ral centuries old, one of its green-and-white walls pressing up against the sand stone perimeter of the ancient school. The local police and the Madhya Pradesh g overnment have tried, with varying degrees of sincerity and opportunism, to regu late the entry of Hindu and Muslim pilgrims into this complex; at the moment, Hi ndus pray on Tuesdays and on Basant Panchami, while Muslims pray on Fridays. The RSS has demanded, through repeated agitations, that the Bhojashala remain perma nently open to Hindus and, implicitly, closed to Muslims. There have been lathi cha rges, and people have been injured and even died. You ll probably see more police than public there, Sanjay Sisodia, a Dhar journalist who runs a slim and extraord inarily colourful local weekly, told me before the rally. In 2006, Friday and Ba sant Panchami fell on the same day; Dhar s Muslims were supposed to pray until 1 p m, but the police could not hold back the swelling sea of Hindu worshippers, and
the lathis had to be broken out. In 2013, Sisodia observed gloomily, Basant Pan chami would again land on a Friday. R.V. MOORTHY / THE HINDU ARCHIVES LK Advani, third from left, flanked by other NDA leaders at a recent meeting in New Delhi. Subramanian Swamy s Janata Party was inducted into the NDA in March of this year some say primarily because of Swamy s reputation as an anti-corruption cru sader.Within this charged and emotional space, as is his wont, Swamy has managed to find for himself an angle that relies on his clinical knowledge of legal and bureaucratic procedure. At the Mumbai airport, Swamy had narrated to me the det ails of a case from his brief tenure as Union minister for commerce and law, in 1990-91. A Nataraja bronze had been scheduled for auction in London, bought off a farmer who found it in a disused temple; Indian authorities argued that, under Hindu law, a temple is always a temple, however disused. If I build it, God is t he owner. I am just the trustee, Swamy told me. The House of Lords surprisingly up held our view. He maintained also that the British Museum s charter allowed it to r eturn objects of religious significance if you re not bringing it back to put into your own museum . I found no such reference in the British Museum Act of 1963, whi ch governs the administration of the museum s possessions; in fact, the Act stoutl y emphasises its reluctance to return artefacts to the country of their origin. Nevertheless, Swamy had told me, with the bumptiousness he wears almost as a sec ond skin, I am going to Britain to bring the idol back. At the parade in Dhar, Swamy s chariot was preceded by another, bearing an enormou s portrait of the Vagdevi, chugging through the tight streets. Antsy policemen l ined either side of the road, and on the odd corner, idling Rapid Action Force v ans exhaled sharp bursts of exhaust fumes, like sighs of impatience. When the pr ocession entered the edges of Dhar s Muslim quarter, I saw its residents peering d own from balconies or sitting on the stoops of their shops, their faces carefull y and stoically composed. There were, as seems almost mandatory with such events , trumpets and drums, their earsplitting notes of forced cheer barely able to ma sk the town s sour sense of worry. Leading the procession, a clump of young men, t heir heads snugly hugged by saffron bandannas, raised one slogan repeatedly: Bhoj ashala hamari hai The Bhojashala is ours. It seemed to be an act of cosmic wryness that Swamy had been pulled into the orb it of the legacy of Bhoj, who ruled Malwa for nearly half of the 11th century. B hoj was known as a scholar of enviable talents; he wrote treatises 84 in all on medi cine, chemistry, civil engineering, Sanskrit grammar, shipbuilding and law, seve ral of which have survived to the present day. He was, however, inept at buildin g political alliances, and much of his life was spent campaigning against foes w ho had once been partners; he died, it is said, on a battlefield trapped between two enemies, harrying him from either side. The parallels of this life with Swamy s are difficult to miss, as is the most nota ble difference: Swamy, with his doctorate in economics from Harvard and his deep knowledge of the law, has only ever occupied one ministerial post, for less tha n a year, in an active political career that stretches back nearly four decades. The Janata Party, once a grand alliance of India s anti-Congress opposition, has withered into a mere vehicle for Swamy s prickliness and ebullience. On paper, Swa my s qualifications for politics and policymaking are striking, almost extravagant . In practice, they have been rendered inert by a process that says much about S wamy. I ve never known a politician to score as many self-goals as him, the Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar told me. But Swamy s story speaks also to the true natu re of the ascent to Indian political power, which resembles not so much a long l adder as a greased pole. A remarkable concatenation of circumstances has now given Swamy a hotter nationa
l profile than he has enjoyed at any time since the mid-1970s, when he became fa mous as a sort of homegrown Simon Templar, nimbly avoiding arrest during Indira Gandhi s Emergency. He has reunited, with great fanfare and after nearly 30 years, with the RSS, which explains his billing as headliner in the rally at Dhar. His tireless enthusiasm for filing cases against corruption has, in a scam involvin g the misallocation of spectrum for 2G mobile services, deposed A Raja as teleco mmunications minister and may yet yank down P Chidambaram from the top of the ho me ministry. Swamy s long tenure in the wilderness, allied permanently to no party and answering to no one but himself, has given him, despite his roots in the Ne w Delhi establishment, the improbable status of an outsider. His Janata Party wa s inducted into the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in March, a senior Bharat iya Janata Party (BJP) member pointed out to me, not because it can deliver vast pools of votes which it can t but because it delivers Swamy as an individual, bundled with his newfound and very valuable cachet as anti-corruption crusader. Swamy is not bashful about declaring himself to be the man of this cynical, viti ated moment, and he isn t entirely incorrect; indeed, he may have even helped make this moment; equally, in other ways, the moment seems also to have been made es pecially for him. Over the years, Swamy s declamations about the sinister workings of the Congress party and about the nexus between business and politics have so unded like fantastical conspiracies. But in this era of the Niira Radia tapes an d the scandal-plagued Central government, his broadsides seem to be finding more purchase in the minds of a public that no longer knows how much it can trust it s leaders, and that cannot figure out the dividing line, in its conception of co rruption, between the possible and the outlandish.
Swamy s political career is rife with contradictions. Some of his admirers have be en drawn to his championing of economic liberalisation, but they have also been dismayed by his stated allegiance to the Hindu right and his views on Muslims; m ost infamously, in a bizarre op-ed in DNA last summer, Swamy suggested that Indi a s Muslims not be permitted to vote unless they acknowledge their Hindu ancestry. He possesses a reputation as an intellectual as an early and credentialled advoca te of economic liberalisation, and even as the draughtsman of the blueprint for Manmohan Singh s economic reforms in 1991. But this reputation has had to coexist with his fondness for airing theories that even his friends call kooky, and with the habits of a hectoring public persona. He compels himself, for instance, to always refer to the Congress party president using her Italian surname Sonia Màino and e ven in private conversations he will refer with the straightest of faces to Rahu l Gandhi as buddhu , or fool (or, in another of Swamy s snarky labels, as Raúl Vinci ). ( my s Twitter feed is a baroque and frenetic mash-up of all these traits. Those mad people who hanged Galileo for telling what Hindus knew for several millennia, he tweeted recently, are born today as Congis [Congress] tweeples. ) He has repeatedly found allies in people whom he has previously attacked without relent common enou gh in politics, but surprising for somebody often called inflexible and uncompro mising. He is intelligent and incorruptible descriptions almost reflexively assign ed to him even by his most bitter critics and yet, in a country that yearns consta ntly for intelligent and incorruptible politicians, Swamy has only ever been the man outside the window, thumping loudly on the glass and hollering to be let in . TWO I
N THE NARRATIVE OF HIS LIFE, as he likes to relate it, Subramanian Swamy was born to be a fighter; he views his career much as a boxer would, as a serie s of memorable bouts. His ancestors, he told me, were a long line of fighting Bra hmins , one of whom led the pugnacious forces of Thirumalai Nayak, the ruler of Ma durai in the mid-1600s. Swamy fought his way to the top of his class in high sch ool and at New Delhi s Hindu College. He fought with his principal in school, and he fought later with PC Mahalanobis, his director at the Indian Statistical Inst itute (ISI) in Calcutta. At Harvard, he fought at least one important economic t
heory of the time which held that the statist model of development was effective ly hauling China and India out of poverty. Then he returned to India and joined politics, the most bruising fight of them all. In Swamy s eyes, he has always been alone in the ring, with no coaches or seconds or water-bottle-squeezers or brow -moppers in his corner; it has always only been his wits against the world. Soon after Swamy s birth in 1939, his father Sitaraman, a mathematics professor, m oved their family from Madras to New Delhi. Sitaraman Subramanian worked in the Indian Statistical Service, retiring as director of the Central Statistical Inst itute, in which capacity he was a statistical adviser to the Government of India ; he was also an active member of the Congress, close to its foremost leaders: K Kamaraj, C Rajagopalachari and S Satyamurti. All the ministers used to come home , because even though he was a civil servant, he was known as a Congress person, Swamy said. And they would talk economics all the time. Swamy shares with his brother RR Subramanian, a nuclear strategist formerly with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, the tendency to talk about his parents as if they were ideologies first and human beings second. My father was v ery left, and his economics would never have suited my brother, Subramanian told me. He was basically a Marxist. He never put the [Brahminical] sacred thread on h is sons. When I interjected, remarking that Swamy had told me a different story of walking away in the middle of his thread ceremony, to the dismay of his parents and the bemusement of the priests Subramanian grimaced: He has given you a version, so let s leave it at that. But my father didn t believe in all of this. V. SUDERSHAN / THE HINDU ARCHIVES Swamy addressing reporters on 2 February outside the Supreme Court after the ann ouncement of the verdict on the 2G case. Swamy s efforts in filing cases against c orruption related to the 2G scam led to the dismissal and prosecution of former telecom minister A Raja.Swamy s mother Padmavati, on the other hand, was a devout Hindu; when I pressed him to explain why he had been anti-communist from a very e arly age , Swamy cited his mother s deep faith and its incompatibility with the comm unist creed, as well as her profound influence on him. Subramanian, who professe d to being far more in his father s mould, said that their mother was so ritualist ic and irrational about her beliefs that my father used to make fun of her. She had no compunction in admitting her hatred for Muslims, and that had to do with hav ing brought up her children near Turkman Gate in Delhi when the Partition riots were happening. Some of the macabre consequences of Partition unfurled on the street right outsi de the family s government-allotted house. I remember dead bodies, trucks of bodies being taken away, Muslim mobs chasing Hindus, and then the Sikhs coming in from Pakistan and reversing it, Swamy said. The Madras troops were sent in, because th ey were neutral, but the regiment was shooting everybody because they couldn t tel l one from the other. I saw the looting of Connaught Place with my own eyes. What Swamy did have in common with his father was an aptitude for mathematics. On e good piece of advice my father gave me: he said, The way economics is taught in India, you won t get very far. You do mathematics first, Swamy recalled. So at Hindu College, I took mathematics, and that stood me in great stead. At Harvard, that was what distinguished me from everybody else, because mathematics at that time was just infecting economics. Swamy s economic papers are concise, and they freque ntly bristled with data and equations; a typical paper such as Consistency of Fish er s Tests from the July 1965 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Econometrica, on the holes in one of the four most important neoclassical microeconomic theories is so dense with mathematics that it is almost more symbols than words. Mathematics is poetry. It s language. You can use it to express whatever you want, the sociolo gist MN Panini, an old friend, remembered Swamy once telling him. Then, Panini s
aid, He also thinks anybody who doesn t know mathematics is not worth talking to. I t s a typical South Indian mentality. Swamy s talent for mathematics was responsible for placing him on the warpath agai nst Mahalanobis, and thence for securing him an admission into Harvard s doctoral programme in economics. Armed even then with his fealty to the free market, Swam y found it easy to be contemptuous of Mahalanobis, the chief designer of the sta tistical methodologies used by Jawaharlal Nehru to plan his economy. At the ISI in Calcutta, studying for a master s degree in statistics, Swamy was convinced tha t Mahalanobis was targeting him for being his father s son. Mahalanobis and my fath er were dead opposed to each other There was bitterness between them, he said. So me of his Tamil professors would tell him that they were under pressure to grade h im poorly. Everybody was telling me: Your career is over. You better go become an apprentice at the Bhilai Steel Plant. Those days, that was the great thing: Bhila i Steel Plant. Instead, Swamy decided to embrace his reputation already acquired, but not yet bur nished as a rebel. In a paper, Notes on Fractile Graphical Analysis , that he mailed off to Econometrica in 1963 in an envelope made out of a brown-paper bag, Swamy showed how a statistical analysis method, which Mahalanobis claimed to have inve nted, was only a differentiated form of an older equation. The article, Swamy sa id, literally destroyed Mahalanobis. But in the paper itself, Swamy was not nearly so scathing. He stated gently that Mahalanobis s claim of having invented a new m ethod was not quite correct ; even more warmly, he called Mahalanobis s approach refre shingly new . The Econometrica referee for this paper, the Amsterdam-born American economist H endrik S Houthakker, happened also to be serving on Harvard s admissions committee , and Swamy told me that, on the basis of this article alone, Harvard admitted h im with a full Rockefeller scholarship. According to Swamy, Mahalanobis tried to persuade him to withdraw his paper; when that failed, he angrily wrote to Harva rd predicting that Swamy would fail his Master s. Harvard wrote back, saying, We adm itted him on the basis of his demonstrated capacity for research, and therefore it doesn t matter if he gets an MA or not, Swamy said. Now that is the Harvard I knew . Then, thinking of Harvard s decision to drop him as a Summer School instructor fo llowing the outcry over his DNA op-ed, he added a little morosely: I don t know if it is the same Harvard today. (Page 2 of 5) His years in Boston were, Swamy readily admits, the happiest of his life; Pani ni told me that Swamy had recently declared to him: I m not pro-American I am America n. He found mentors in Simon Kuznets at Harvard, who was fascinated by developing economies, and Paul Samuelson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mat hematically rigorous but also less trusting than Swamy of the market s innate wisd oms. Often, echoing the very libertarians Samuelson was wary of, Swamy has sugge sted the abolition of income tax to spur savings and investment; in one of our c onversations, he referred to Milton Friedman, who argued for free markets and fo r minimal government intervention in the economy, as the archpriest of Swamy s econo mic faith. Swamy completed his PhD in two-and-a-half years and then swarmed up the academic ladder, becoming an assistant professor in economics in July 1966, before he tu rned 27. He met his future wife Roxna, a Parsi, when she was a doctoral student in mathematics at Harvard. (Roxna, a Supreme Court advocate, refused to be inter viewed for this article, saying that she had been misquoted liberally by a weekl y newsmagazine; his two daughters Gitanjali Swamy, a private equity investment pro fessional in the US, and Suhasini Haider, the deputy foreign editor at CNN-IBN did not respond to requests for comments. Relations between him and his daughters a re warm, Swamy told me, but Suhasini won t even read pieces about me on air. ) He bou
ght a car, which he loved to drive. He learnt Mandarin, and once he could read a cademic material and data sources in that language, he wrote a book arguing that all this talk of China growing at seven or eight per cent was all bakwaas (nonse nse). They were growing at 3.5 per cent, same as India. No state-driven economy, he firmly believed, could deliver that sort of galloping progress. The book, titled Economic Growth in China and India, 1952-1970 and published in 1973, earned tepid academic reviews. The Stanford professor of economics John Gu rley, in The Journal of Economic History, questioned Swamy s deft manipulations of daft data , and a reviewer in The Journal of Asian Studies, while calling Swamy s me thods technically sophisticated , wrote that he had missed the main strengths and we aknesses of [India and China s] great development efforts . In the classroom, though, Swamy seems to have been uniformly impressive. Shahid Javed Burki, who had taken Swamy s mathematical economics class in 1967 and become fast friends with his professor, told me that Swamy was an extremely good teach er. He was very well spoken of, and he was very popular, said Burki, who went on t o become a caretaker finance minister of Pakistan. Panini recalls hearing Swamy deliver lectures at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in the ear ly 1970s: He was brilliant. He has a very neat and sharp mind, and a capacity to analyse things and put them across in a systematic, convincing way. One of his fo rmer teaching assistants during his summer gig at Harvard a few years ago, who a sked that her name be withheld, told me that Swamy was really enthusiastic . The cl ass was called Economic Development in India and East Asia , and Swamy, she said, ha d an anecdotal teaching style. He d tell lots of stories about his experiences wit h government, and he was always very generous with his time. He was definitely t he smartest person in that room. At the end of the term, he hosted a dinner at t he Bombay Club, in Harvard Square. Most professors don t do things like that for u ndergraduates. The one great tragedy of Swamy s Harvard life occurred early one January morning i n 1968, when a faulty boiler sparked a fire that gutted the building holding muc h of his research. James Fallows, then a reporter for The Harvard Crimson, and n ow the national correspondent for The Atlantic, remembered the fire as the event that gave him his first story. In weather that was so cold that water froze as s oon as it came out of the firehoses , Fallows said in a 1996 commencement speech a t Northwestern University, the firemen failed to quench the blaze. Swamy, standi ng next to Fallows on the sidewalk, looked more distraught than interested to see the building burn down . In the Crimson, Fallows reported that Swamy lost irreplac eable notes from research in Japan and Hong Kong . In 1968, Swamy met Jayaprakash Narayan, the Gandhian activist, during the latter s visit to Harvard. Narayan, who was on the cusp of moving back into politics fro m his activist s life in the Sarvodaya movement, told Swamy that India needed youn g people like him. By that time, Swamy had already started to get annoyed by peop le running India down, [even though] India was an open society ; in the throes of his heated defences of India, he would be called an Indian chauvinist, which wou ld prod him even further into anger. He spent three summer months teaching at De lhi University in 1968, returning to Harvard with a written offer from Amartya S en, then head of the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), to occupy a new chair on C hinese studies. The very next year, he moved back to New Delhi. Talking about the events of those years always gives Swamy cause to deploy one o f his most well-worn phrases: the French trahison des clercs , describing the betra yal of academic independence by intellectuals snuggling up to the state. While S wamy had been away, the Congress party had split, the left had become a more imp ortant player in India s power structure, and the new Delhi University vice chance llor KN Raj, as well as others in government, looked with distaste upon Swamy s fr ee-market proclivities. When Swamy returned to take up his seat at the DSE, he f ound the offer rescinded. Somewhere among his papers, Swamy said, he still has A
martya Sen s letter, saying, You can teach mathematical economics as well as China, it will be a great combination, and I am dusting your gaddi (seat) for you those we re the very words he used. Swamy never showed me Sen s letter, however. But over email, Amartya Sen told me that the entire sequence of events postulated by Swamy is imagined . Delhi University s decision to create a chair in Chinese stu dies, Sen said, was completely unrelated to Swamy. In the competition for the app ointment, his application failed to prevail. I was not in the selection committe e for the chair, but I did try to make sure that Swamy s case should receive a goo d hearing from the committee. After the meeting, I was told by the vice chancell or of Delhi University that the chair did not go Swamy s way. Swamy perceived treachery and a sort of ideological discrimination as the nucleu s of this setback. Indian intellectuals are the worst, he sneered to me, his fury having transmuted over the decades into a cutting coldness. They can t stand up for anything. Not yet 30, with a young wife and a newborn daughter, Swamy had no job and no prospects, in an India that seemed to have arrayed the forces of her est ablishment against him. THREE A T DHAR, Swamy s chariot halted outside the Bhojashala, and for a brief, fr enzied 20 minutes, he was hurried into the temple through a dense, sweating crow d. I didn t make it into the shrine, so I stood on a stone plinth outside and trie d in vain to peer over the shoulders of the faithful. Then Swamy strode back out , and his hosts led him to a small maidan where a couple hundred people had been assembled under a blue-and-pink tent. Swamy sat on the dais and, as local RSS o fficials rose to speak, he checked his BlackBerry, looked into the distance, and bit the fingers of his right hand in slow sequence. Swamy s own 40-minute speech was articulate enough, but he is hardly an orator to rouse the masses. His Hindi is faultless but formal. He carries a stock quiver o f smart-aleck barbs, several of them directed towards the Gandhi family; one sta ple runs: What is 2G, after all, but Sonia-ji and Rahul-ji? But Swamy also frequen tly talks over the collective head of his audience. To the Basant Panchami crowd , trying to explain how the distinction between Aryan and Dravidian had been cre ated for political capital, he meandered into a spiel on genetics and DNA testin g; later, when he was assuring the crowd that he would retrieve their Vagdevi id ol, he quoted at them the idol s accession number in the British Museum catalogue. Swamy is, as RR Subramanian told me, no campaigner: He s always a Rajya Sabha man, a man appointed to Parliament. Swamy has won only one election in the past 30 ye ars in 1998, when J Jayalalithaa threw the formidable hulk of the All India Anna D ravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) behind the Janata Party in Madurai. SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN FOR THE CARAVAN Swamy atop a silver chariot in Dhar, where he told crowds in January he would re trieve their missing idol from the British Museum.After Swamy ended his speech, the rally s organisers asked him to guest-referee a wrestling match, which he game ly did, patting the oiled backs of the wrestlers and posing for photographs. Sta nding next to me, Jagdish Shetty, the Janata Party s general secretary and Swamy s r ight hand, looked on with almost doting pride and said, You know, in the early 19 80s, Busybee Contractor wrote a column predicting three future Indian prime mini sters: Rajiv Gandhi because of his family, Atal Bihari Vajpayee because of his p arty, and Swamy because of his capability. Busybee, astute journalist that he was , had picked two winners, Shetty seemed to be suggesting, and there was no reaso n yet why Swamy wouldn t help Busybee posthumously hit the trifecta. We had driven for two hours from Indore to reach Dhar, having first caught a 5 a
m flight from Mumbai to Indore. The previous day, Swamy had been in Chennai, whe re I had watched him speak at a girls college; the day before that, Swamy had bee n at home in New Delhi. From Indore, he was scheduled to fly back to Mumbai, and then on to Thiruvananthapuram to be the guest of honour at a Rotary Club event. For the past year, Swamy has rarely stayed in a single place longer than two da ys; he travels incessantly because there is a fresh clamour for him, from many p arts of India, to come rouse some swayamsevaks or provoke some young minds or po ntificate at some club meeting or deliver some anti-corruption seminar. Maybe the confidence of the public has grown that I mean what I say and that I say what I mean, Swamy said. Sam Rajappa, a veteran journalist with The Statesman in Chenna i and an old friend of Swamy s, told me, Before the 2G scam, if Swamy called a pres s conference, I and another journalist, Gopinath, in his 80s now, would reliably go, because of our old relationship. Otherwise, it would only be a couple of ri ff-raff journalists coming in to ask silly questions. Now you can t even find stan ding room in a Subramanian Swamy press conference. Swamy is sustained, in this daily life, by an energy that is tiring even to cont emplate. Every morning, he is awake at 4 am for a spell of yoga, and he is rarel y at rest, at least in any Newtonian sense, until he goes to bed at 10 pm. He ea ts so sparingly that it can be cause for alarm; at a late lunch in an RSS worker s house in Dhar, the rest of us fell upon our food, but Swamy, who had spoken at the rally, and who had been hustled and jostled and hugged and fêted, ate two poor is and nothing more. He sleeps, if he can, on flights, but more reliably, he wil l pilfer a nap out of his afternoon s schedule. Once, when we were rattling along on a truly dreadful stretch of road, he interrupted himself to say, Okay, now I m g oing to sleep. It was as if a switch had been flipped; for 25 minutes, he fell in to deep slumber, not woken even by the most lunar of potholes, his chin slumped into his neck. Then he woke up and, after only a momentary pause, resumed precis ely where he had left off. In some of his habits, Swamy s brother describes him as almost Gandhian in his rigid ity. In person, and in photos dating back more than 30 years, I never saw Swamy in any attire other than a white kurta-pajama, with perhaps the addition of a wa istcoat in colder weather. (Thus dressed, he secretes away his three mobile phon es in various pockets, so his waistcoat has the disconcerting tendency to chirru p or beep softly every few minutes.) Some years ago, when Swamy was in Washingto n, DC, Burki invited him to dinner at the Cosmos Club and told him, Swamy, you ll h ave to put on a jacket and a tie. Swamy refused. Burki said with a laugh, I had to call the club and tell them that he was a former minister and that he wanted to come in his national dress. They said that if he put on some kind of shawl, the y would let him in. So Swamy borrowed a shawl and put that on.
(Page 3 of 5) In conversation and in repose, Swamy is largely inscrutable, his heavy-lidded eyes revealing little of his thoughts; although his innate restlessness leaks ou t of him through the occasional tic, he is a careful listener and a conscientiou s observer. He is also, his brother Subramanian said, inordinately sensitive, an d he keeps a limpet-like hold on old grievances, however trivial. Subramanian re membered learning the phrase black sheep in school, when he was a little boy, and casually aiming it at Swamy during a pillow fight. For years thereafter, Subrama nian told me, Swamy went on repeating it. Even today, he ll say, You called me the b lack sheep of the family. I was a boy of what? eight or nine years? Panini described S wamy as a man who would go all out after you, to decimate you, if he thinks you h ave crossed him or done something wrong . MD Nalapat, a close friend of Swamy and a former Times of India editor, suggested in a Sunday Guardian column last Novem ber that Swamy s ruthless legal pursuit of P Chidambaram is really part of settlin g an old score. In 1997, Nalapat wrote, when Chidambaram was finance minister, h
e had tried to arrest Swamy for his involvement in a trust set up by Chandraswam i, the self-appointed Tantrik godman accused of serial financial fraud. In his v iews on revenge, Nalapat wrote, Subramanian Swamy is Sicilian. Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had been fairly friendly with Swamy through the 1980s, saw that relationship evaporate in a single evening in 1992. Representing the Oxfor d and Cambridge Society of India, Aiyar had taken on Swamy, who spoke for the Ha rvard Club of India, in a debate titled W(h)ither India? I still maintain it was a stupid subject, Aiyar said. When his turn came to speak, Aiyar remarked that if t he rumours then appearing in the newspapers about Swamy joining the Congress were tr ue, then India would indeed wither on the vine, because this is one unique indivi dual, who has never left his party, but his party-men have left him. The remark w as, Aiyar insisted, tossed off in entirely good humour. He hasn t spoken to me sinc e. He has no sense of humour. He has some wit, certainly, but a sense of humour is the ability to laugh at yourself, and he doesn t have that. Aiyar criticised Swamy for not being a team player, and for possessing no social skills to that end, but Subramanian thinks his brother merely finds it easy to be detached and impersonal. Sometimes I think he carries this detachment too far, Subramanian told me. During the Emergency, when he was going underground to avoid arrest, my mother asked him, When will I see you again? Swamy said, In our next bi rth. My father was so upset about that remark. One friend who knew him in the 1970 s, and who wished to remain anonymous, told me that Swamy used to be very fond o f dogs. He d praise the Indian mongrel as the best kind of dog out there, he said. Bu t his way of disciplining his dog was brutal. He d tie it to a tree and beat it se verely if it did anything wrong. This empathy deficit illustrated why, the friend said, he thought Swamy wasn t cut out for Indian politics: There s a lot of deferenc e and emotional attachment involved here. It s not just about making powerful deba ting points. BHAWAN SINGH / INDIA TODAY GROUP Swamy carrying books at Parliament Gate in 1989. He was asked to join the Rajya Sabha for the Janata Party in 1973.Above any sort of sentiment, I was told endle ssly by those who know him, Swamy values intelligence. Nalapat, who first met Sw amy at a Holi party thrown in 1988 by the Times of India scion Samir Jain where ins tead of playing Holi, we sat in a corner and talked laissez-faire economics likened Swamy s temperament to that of the irascible diplomat VK Krishna Menon. The compa rison is not entirely sound, though. Despite his deep reserves of arrogance and vitriol, Menon hitched his wagon shrewdly and tightly enough to Nehru s star that he was frequently called India s second-most powerful man; Swamy has fared emphati cally less well. Swamy suffers fools very badly and very publicly, and he doesn t want to convince i diots that they are geniuses, Nalapat, an occasional columnist for the RSS weekly , Organiser, told me. That s a weakness, because in Indian politics, you never know who will be useful when. Swamy is close to his daughters, Panini said, but even w ith them, he really likes their brains. The first thing he will say about his gr anddaughter, for instance, is, See, she s very bright! But it was from Panini also th at I heard the most touching story about Swamy about how, after his father s demise, Swamy had rescued from some obscure government file a paper authored by Sitaraman Subramanian, and had gotten it published in an academic journal. It was a curio us act of filial love, but for Swamy, there could perhaps be no more genuine ges ture of respect. FOUR M
N PANINI HAD JOINED IIT DELHI in 1968, teaching economics and sociology, after studying at the DSE a place that was, as he described it, a bastion of left
ism. When I emerged after my MA, I thought anybody who didn t believe in Marx wasn t a human being. I d been indoctrinated, said Panini, who now lives as a semi-retired academic in Mysore. After Swamy s prospects at that very school had collapsed, he had worked for a few months with Jayaprakash Narayan s Sarvodaya movement in Madu rai, but after becoming impatient with its strictly apolitical temper, he quit a nd joined the IIT economics department in December 1969. Swamy came to IIT as a b reath of fresh air, Panini said. He was saying things that shook me up and made me see my teachers in a different light altogether. Panini describes the IIT of the early 1970s as an authoritarian place, which imm ediately seems to disqualify it as an environment suitable for Swamy. He lasted three years. To the consternation of his peers, Swamy preferred to hang out with junior professors or with his students. Along with Panini and Amit Mitra, now W est Bengal s finance minister, Swamy helped set up IIT Delhi employee organisation s, which can only be called right-wing unions, agitating on behalf of their memb ers but not bound to the left, the traditional tent-pole of unionism. He called so stridently for economic liberalisation blasphemy in socialist India that even his prime minister was forced to take note; in Parliament, during the debate on the budget in 1970, Indira Gandhi famously dismissed him as a Santa Claus with unrea listic ideas . He spoke his mind frequently, and caustically, at IIT faculty meeti ngs. Since he didn t believe in taking attendance in his classes, he didn t; he simp ly signed every one of his students in as Present and handed in his registers. This banal matter of the attendance register, in the end, proved to be ostensibl y one of the proximate causes for his dismissal from IIT Delhi. One of the stude nts whom Swamy had been marking Present for an entire term had, in fact, dropped t he class after registering for it, which brought Swamy s practice to the attention of the IIT s director. Swamy told me that his dismissal came as a complete shock; he was sitting in his campus office one day in December 1972, he said, and they sent me this letter, [saying] as of 5 pm you re out . But Panini told me that Swamy must have known he was in trouble. They didn t ask him to defend himself in an inqu iry, so maybe that was why he was surprised. But he knew they were after his blo od. In the first major lawsuit of his life, Swamy sued IIT Delhi for wrongful dis missal; he won, but he is still petitioning to receive the salary owed to him, w ith 18 percent interest, from 1973 to 1991. This was, for Swamy, an inflexion point. By the end of 1973, he had started to s ense a marked hostility towards his job applications from academic institutions across India; his wife s applications, he said, proved similarly unpopular. There c ame a time when I ran out of money and I finally told my wife, Let s go back [to Am erica]. I felt very bad about it, Swamy said. And out of the blue, I got a phone ca ll from Nanaji Deshmukh in the Jan Sangh, saying we re sending you to the Rajya Sa bha. If I hadn t got that call, I would have gone back. INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE Swamy with Prime Minister Morarji Desai in the 1970s. When Swamy was denied the post of finance minister under Desai, he blamed the machinations of Vajpayee.Swa my had been attending Jan Sangh meetings since his return from Harvard in 1969, often under the wing of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had taken a liking to him. KN Govindacharya, a senior RSS pracharak, still remembers a speech Swamy delivered at a Jan Sangh conclave in Patna in 1970: He spoke about his Swadeshi plan for 10 percent economic growth, and he mesmerised everybody. This was, for Swamy, famil iar terrain another kind of classroom, even, where he could in theory free India s e conomy from government control and foreign aid, build a nuclear deterrent, const ruct a national water grid to produce an agricultural surplus, and freeze India s ties with the Soviet Union. The Jan Sangh, a precursor of the BJP, had no econom ic plank to speak of at the time, Swamy said, and they saw in him a man who coul d provide a certain academic ballast.
For his part, Swamy experienced an unfamiliar sense of welcome in the Jan Sangh. When I asked him if he ever regretted turning his back on the academic life, he said that it had been an easy decision. I had felt such a sense of betrayal by t he intellectual class, he said. And these people were being very nice to me. That is why I felt comfortable with the Jan Sangh. Panini, who talked to him frequentl y during this period, suspects that Swamy must have been more conflicted about l eaving academia than he cares to admit today. But I think even when he came back from Harvard, he had a vision of becoming the prime minister, and he made no bon es about it, Panini said. I remember him telling someone else, If you come back to India, don t come as a wimp. You have to come here to fight. The Jan Sangh sheltered and protected Swamy during the most dramatic segment of his life: his escape from arrest and his re-entry into India during the Emergenc y a caper involving disguises, chutzpah and an intimate study of airline timetable s. K Natwar Singh, who was the deputy high commissioner to the UK in the mid-197 0s, recalled that Swamy had landed up at India House in London without a passpor t; he had arrived there via Sri Lanka, after having circulated through the house s of friends scattered across India for six months, often travelling in a beard and a Sikh turban. His passport had been impounded because of the Emergency, Singh told me, and I know he wasn t issued one in London, because I would have been awar e of it. The high commissioner at the time was BK Nehru, and he asked Swamy, How will you get out of the UK? He said, I ll get out the same way I got in. He did. Swamy continued on to the US, where he was promptly offered a visiting p rofessorship at Harvard, and where he set up an organisation called Friends of I ndia to decry Indira Gandhi and the Emergency overseas. When he started to fear that an unbroken absence of more than 60 working days from Parliament might stri p him of his Rajya Sabha seat, Swamy booked himself a British Airways ticket fro m London to Bangkok; this way, he figured , his name would not appear on the man ifest of India-bound passengers even though the flight would stop for refuelling in New Delhi. In the transit lounge at the Delhi airport, Swamy walked backward s into the main terminal, flashed his parliamentary ID at the constable on duty, exited the airport and caught a taxi into the city. I needed nerves of steel, Swa my recalled. On 10 August 1976, Swamy signed the attendance book and oiled into the Rajya Sab ha just as the last name in a list of obituaries was being read out; he told me that his entrance was carefully timed to give him an opening to state loudly: Mr Speaker, you ve left out democracy, which has also died. Swamy still chortles at th e memory of the confounded faces of his fellow parliamentarians: They were thinki ng I was going to throw a bomb, frankly. Before the Rajya Sabha s security staff could be summoned, Swamy had nipped back o ut of Parliament. He drove to a rendezvous with his wife, changed his clothes an d, with the help of the RSS, sank back into the underground; later, slipping ove r the border into Nepal, he returned to America. Jagdish Shetty narrated to me a n observation reportedly made by CM Stephen, one of Indira Gandhi s closest aides, that she declared elections soon after Swamy s escapade because if he could get in to India and even into Parliament undetected, it showed things were not as much under her control as she d thought . A haze of apocrypha hangs over this interpretat ion of Gandhi s motives, but it served well to embellish the mythos that Swamy had managed to construct around himself. For us working in the underground at the ti me, said Shetty, a longtime RSS swayamsevak, there was a halo around Swamy during the Emergency. How much this reputation helped Swamy win his first Lok Sabha seat, from the Mum bai North-East constituency in the elections immediately after the Emergency, is unclear. In 1977, Sam Rajappa told me, even if you had put up a donkey as a Janata Party candidate, it would have won. Ever since 1977, Swamy s career in electoral p
olitics has been a perpetual coalescing and re-coalescing of allies and foes, ev en though he remained rooted in the increasingly thinning ranks of the Janata Pa rty.
