Most people do not know how to categorise Subramanain Swamy, teacher, economist, mathematician, an expert on China and an upright politician, in the habit of making ‘wild allegations’. Unlike most Indian leaders, he is highly educated. If he had continued in academics, he would have perhaps been a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Swamy was among the four favourite students of Paul Samuelson; three of them have got the Nobel. But Swamy left academics after 10 years and has been a full-time politician for the past 35 years. He is also one of the rare leaders whose name has never been dragged into any scam or even minor transgression. Finally, he has shown how effectively one can use the justice system in the public interest.
A combination of such rare brilliance and honesty ought to have made him India’s most effective politician, with an opportunity to change the lives of millions. And, yet, he has been a minister only once (in the ramshackle Chandra Shekhar government of 1990) and remained out of power ever since. Even after the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, Swamy has only been made a Rajya Sabha member and that, too, after more than two years of waiting.
All this is a very long way from the day when, armed with a Master’s in mathematical statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, he first met Samuelson in his office in September 1962, wanting to join his advanced mathematical economics course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Samuelson used to select only 20 students from among about 200 applicants.
Swamy was already a bit of a sensation in the academic world because, as a student at ISI, he had published a research paper in the world’s then most prestigious journal Econometrica, demolishing PC Mahalanobis’ claim to fame on fractile graphical analysis. That paper earned him admission to Harvard and, in two years, Swamy had earned his PhD. In an early class of Samuelson, Swamy interrupted Samuelson’s lecture to say, “You have one equation wrong, so you will not be able to prove the theorem.” When Swamy corrected the mistake, Samuelson said: “See me after the class.” When Swamy saw him, he told him: “I think you and I should write a joint paper some day.” Some 10 years later, Swamy co-authored a famous paper with Samuelson on the "Theory of Index Numbers".
As his fame spread in the academic world, Amartya Sen invited him to join the faculty of the Delhi School of Economics. But, by then, Swamy was developing strong ideological positions. He believed that India needed a free market for economic growth, a nuclear bomb to strengthen and establish its position in the world and open up relations with Israel.
As Roxna Swamy, his wife and steadfast supporter all these years through the ordeal under Emergency, many court cases and nasty physical attacks by Jayalalitha’s goons, writes in her memoir: “Swamy started out in India in 1968-1969 with the best of intentions. He really simply wanted to write his research papers and enlighten his extremely bright and focused students.” In 1968 summer, in one of his lectures, Swamy advanced a startling new thesis: with the infrastructure already developed, India could produce an atom bomb and delivery system for just a few lakh rupees.
This caught the attention of the Hindu right wing party, the Jan Sangh, which invited Swamy to address their parliamentary party. Swamy talked about the need for a Hindu renaissance and the correct dating of historical events and records, the need for a market economy, normalising relations with Israel and so on. “Perhaps his speeches were too successful for his own good,” writes Roxna in Evolving with Subramanian Swamy. “They convinced an appalled Delhi University Establishment that Swamy could lead a thought revolution… hurriedly, the Chair in Chinese Economics created at Delhi University for Swamy, which Amartya Sen had promised Swamy ‘is being dusted and got ready for you’, was withdrawn.”
Swamy, with his impeccable academic credentials, became Professor of Economics at the IIT, Delhi. Soon, the students, the Employees Union and the lower faculty staff were at Swamy’s doorstep, pouring their grievances into Swamy’s ears. This did not make him popular with the IIT powers that be, since these included things like the corruption involved in developing the Delhi IIT campus.
The director was “a construction engineer with no teaching or research qualifications that we could discover, but with an entrée to Indira Gandhi through his wife who was teaching lkebana flower arrangements to the PM and her daughter-in-law Sonia,” writes the author.
Soon, faced with an agitating Employees Union and students, the director was determined to see that Swamy’s appointment was not made permanent. His temporary appointment as professor was extended again and again and a selection committee was set up. To make sure there was no unanimity, the director set it up with nine members and, since there was a requirement that there must be a foreign expert on it, he asked around to find a suitably leftist foreign expert. It was Leon Hurwitz.
The chairman of the selection committee was someone from the reputedly left wing Delhi School of Economics, one Professor Manmohan Singh, later prime minister of India. When Professor Hurwitz realised that the applicant was a co-author of a paper with Samuelson, he could only gasp, “That is something I would give my left arm for. Of course, he must be selected!” Singh concurred. Swamy was unanimously appointed to hold the professorship; but he did not last long.
Meanwhile, Swamy grew closer to the Jan Sangh, working out, “The Swadeshi Plan - An Alternative Approach to Socialism”. lndira Gandhi laughed at it, in a speech in parliament in 1970, calling Swamy a Santa Claus with unrealistic ideas. Swamy was emerging as quite an intellectual force because, after two years, he was suddenly dismissed from IIT with one month’s salary in lieu of notice. In his first attempt at using the justice system to right a wrong, Swamy filed a suit in the Tis Hazari District Court and got a Court stay order permitting him to continue to occupy the IIT flat. But IIT proposed to evict Swamy, his wife and two young daughters by force. Warned by a policeman from the local police station, Swamy set off to his lawyers’ place to collect the Tis Hazari Court’s Stay Order; “while the children, the cook and I settled down to wait for it,” writes Roxna.
“Unfortunately Swamy can never resist a political discussion; so on the way to the lawyers’, he stopped off to have some discussion or other with his mentor Nanaji Deshmukh... Meanwhile all hell broke loose. Heaven knows how many trucks and beldars rolled up; someone got out and politely asked me to leave forthwith with my belongings as they had an eviction order. I tried to explain that we had a Stay Order but beldar types and the IIT official superintending the melee, do not know or respect such niceties; I slammed the door in their faces, called in the cook as reinforcement, and we dragged all the drawing room and dining room furniture and piled it up against the door which the beldars were hammering at. An hour later, the police arrived and must have made the IIT minions see some reason, because they left… that was our first brush with the LAW. And it was a victory! After that, there was no looking back.”
Some 20 years later, Swamy won his case against the IIT: his termination was quashed and he got a declaration that he continued all along in the service of the IIT with all salary and perquisites. But, by that time, Swamy was a Union Cabinet minister and in no position to teach, so he sent a letter resigning from the IIT and claiming his back wages. The IIT accepted his resignation; but continued with its legal case.
“By then, Swamy was hooked to the legal route as a weapon in his fight against corruption… he is by now a recognised authority on all sorts of law, without a law degree,” writes Roxna. Indeed, Moneylife benefited immensely from his counsel while defending its defamation case against National Stock Exchange.
Swamy planned to return to Harvard. But, in 1974, elections to the UP legislative assembly came up and Jana Sangh leader Nanaji Deshmukh asked Swamy whether he would like to manage the four Lucknow seats. Next, Nanaji and Lal Krishna Advani wanted to field Swamy for the Rajya Sabha seat. Swamy had turned into a politician.
Things moved quite dramatically after that. Swamy discovered that Sonia Gandhi was doing brisk business as a life insurance agent even though she was not an Indian citizen and forced Indira to declare in the Parliament that Sonia had given up her agency. In 1974, Indira faced a 20-day railway strike by 1.7 million employees and, on 25 June 1975, she declared Emergency, arresting hundreds of Opposition leaders.
Swamy, disguised as a Sardarji and Nanaji Deshmukh, as a businessman, moved around the country organising an underground resistance. Among the safest places was Gujarat, which had an anti-Congress government and Swamy was taken care of in Ahmedabad by one Narendra Modi. Soon, thereafter, Nanaji was arrested and Swamy went to Colombo from Tamil Nadu and from there to London and the US.
The Emergency made a hero out of Swamy as he evaded arrest for the entire 19-month period. Within that, not to get suspended from parliament, Swamy came into India, broke through security cordons of parliament, attended a Rajya Sabha session on 10 August 1976 and slipped out. Eventually, a parliamentary committee pronounced Swamy guilty of a “conduct unbecoming a Member of Parliament” and recommended his expulsion.
By then, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), too, was keen to get Swamy out of India. It is in describing this period that Roxna reveals the reason for Swamy’s lifelong animosity against Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was one of the reasons for Swamy being in the wilderness for two decades from the mid-1990s till mid-2010.
Apparently, a group consisting of Vajpayee and two others “were proposing to sign some sort of a surrender accepting the need for Indira Gandhi’s 20-Point Programme and legitimacy of the Emergency; but that was being held up because ‘Swamy was not cooperating’,” writes Roxna. Swamy agreed to leave India. He walked across the Indo-Nepal border and got into a rickshaw that was waiting for him in Nepal, where King Birendra had arranged for a plane which flew him to Kathmandu. He caught a Royal Nepal Airline plane to Bangkok, and from there took a Thai Airline flight to London via Rome. The Thai plane developed engine trouble in Rome but almost, miraculously, an Italian lady came up to him and asked if he had an Indian passport and whether he had no luggage. When he confirmed both facts, she quietly led him to a London bound plane which was ready to leave, and settled him in the sole unfilled first class seat, (Swamy only had an economy ticket). To this day, Swamy does not know who she was.
Roxna writes “Swamy’s expulsion, also showed me how small, mean, envious and malicious a man was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Parliamentary Leader of the Jan Sangh. Vajpayee instructed the party’s legal cell not to help Swamy fight the Rajya Sabha expulsion order.” When Roxna confronted him, Vajpayee charged that Swamy’s ‘wrongdoings’ were damaging the credibility of the Sangh. Apparently, “Swamy had signed and collected some Rs400 or Rs500 daily allowance by ‘claiming’ to have attended Parliament on the days immediately before and after Parliament met in June 1975. Vajpayee kept insisting piously that this amount was the ‘fruit of corruption’.
Writes Roxna: “But it soon became clear to me that Vajpayee was seething because anyone could see the contrast between Swamy’s heroic and selfless struggle for which he had sacrificed his family’s wellbeing and comfort and Vajpayee’s self-indulgence in the arms of the family of his foster daughter. I left in disgust… When you consider the literally hundreds of crores that Vajpayee, his foster daughter’s family and his friends and creatures are reputed to have made while in power, I find it laughable that he could have castigated Swamy for his ‘corruption’ of a few hundred rupees.”
This is a fast-paced and well-written book that offers a rare peek into the first two decades of Swamy’s political career and is a must-read for anyone curious about Swamy and the events of 1970s and 1980s. It does not discuss much of what happened after Narasimha Rao government came to power nor any of Swamy’s anti-corruption cases which have yielded dramatic results. We will await the second volume.
Extremely well educated and knowledgable,totally uncorrupt