Who Can Decode Subramanian Swamy Better Than His Wife in Her Book?

An excerpt from Roxna Swamy’s book ‘Evolving with Subramanian Swamy - A roller coaster ride’

A mathematician by training and a lawyer by profession, Roxna Swamy has written a book, ‘Evolving with Subramanian Swamy – A roller coaster ride’. It chronicles the maverick academician turned anti-corruption crusader’s political life till 1990.

She tells The Quint during a sit-down interview at the Swamys’ Pandara Road residence:

That’s because life and politics with Swamy has become far more problematic after the1990s. I didn’t want to enter into the thicket of that period, because then its too close to modern times and people have very strong affiliations, which still persist.

The idea of a book that aims to “set the record straight” came from an interview to the BBC that the network refused to carry.

“The BBC phoned me up for an interview on the anniversary of the Emergency. I wasn’t very forthcoming at first, but then I thought it over and said, ‘Well, if you carry one incident I tell you, I’ll give you the interview.’ He said, ‘of course’. Then I told him about an episode which occurs in my book itself, about my treatment by Atal Bihari Vajpayee during the Emergency. He promised he’d carry it, and, of course, he didn’t carry it. So I stuck my feet in.”

“I was angry because the BBC tried to block my memories,” she says. Intended to be an article at first, she continued to write what is now a book that tells the Swamys’ side of the story.

Here’s an excerpt from Roxna Swamy’s self-published book:

India of the 1960s and early 1970s was securely in the grip of the Soviets. This was not just indigenous naïve left liberalism: a whole generation of upper-class Indian intellectuals had been reared (brainwashed) in the post war English universities where it was fashionable not just to be left but actually Communist (witness the Cambridge group assimilated under Kim Philby and Antony Burgess and the like, which mentored post-war Indians of the Mahalanobis to Parthasarathy to even as late as the Amartya Sen school). For these persons’ interests (ideological as well as personal), it was vital to ensure that the stranglehold on India of the Soviet model of socialism be ensured for all time; and in this respect the “Bombay” group had stood out as dissenters with an alternative approach. In any case, Bombay, unlike Delhi and Calcutta, has always been more concerned with commerce than with politics, and its thinking tends to be rightwing. So actually Parthasarathy’s plain and blunt lecture to the Swamy of 1972-1973, could have had sinister connotations: Parthasarathy not only gloated about the Soviet hegemony over India and its stranglehold over all centres of power and patronage; but even implied that Swamy could expect no relief from his US friends and contacts, because Russia and the US had already partitioned the world between them and had accepted that India would remain in the Soviet sphere.

Swamy, who can quietly maintain a grudge for decades, finally got back at Parthasarathy in the late 1980s. All through the Indira Gandhi years, Parthasarathy had been the accepted doyen of foreign policy; and so when Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister, he naturally hoped to continue as such. He presented himself to Rajiv. Unfortunately Swamy who happened to be just visiting Rajiv then, was sitting in the next room, and Rajiv, unsure in his knowledge of foreign policy had happened to turn to Swamy on this point; and it took Swamy no time at all to pour scorn on Parthasarathy’s qualifications and achievements. Parthasarathy got no post under Rajiv.

But the likes of Parthasarathy apart, Swamy had elsewhere too a lot of “black listing” and “black-outing” to contend with off-and-on over the next decades. Again perhaps from the Soviet Union, the Delhi elite — governing classes, intellectuals, journalists-in-the-upper-echelons, media lions, the “clercs” as defined by Kaushal Dass — had developed the concept of the “non-person” and how to deal with this animal: you black him out of all possible press coverage (certainly all favourable coverage), and make sure he does not get invited to lectures, seminars, even elite parties: also if it became necessary to refer at all to him, it must be done from a plane of judgmental superiority and concentrate on Swamy’s shortcomings, moral and intellectual and –most criminal of all — ”communal”. I found that it was considered quite acceptable in polite circles to refer to Swamy (who to my knowledge, has never lifted a physical finger against anyone) as “that young ruffian”. The critics did not hesitate to be downright dishonest if necessary: one eminent editor spread far and wide his “information” that Swamy had never actually been to Harvard at all: we learnt this from his junior who, having lived with us during her student years in Boston, could hardly back up his lie.

With Swamy, this “non-person” treatment did not continue sustained and uninterrupted and at all times; for example when Swamy became an MP and later a Minister, he could at intervals be flooded with attention (not always welcome!). Also, for some reason, the diplomatic world in Delhi did not appear to have any instructions in this regard because Swamy continued to be invited to a lot of embassy parties.

Perhaps the diplomatic world had a professional interest in news collection about the real India at grass root level rather than the artificial Delhi of the ruling elite (I think I shall designate it as “Lutyens Delhi” because the ordinary middle-class and trader Delhi coverage of (even benign interest in) Swamy continued over all the blackout years). Also, the press blackout did not appear to extend beyond the English language “national” press and definitely it did not appear to be enforced/enforceable outside of Delhi.

So very often, friends and contacts elsewhere than in Delhi would phone us up to tell us of some news item about Swamy that had been carried in their local press. Or they would post us a press cutting. Also, until in the 1990s the designation of Swamy as a “non-person” was extended to RSS and BJP strongholds, the reportage in the Sangh press and the invitations to Sangh seminars continued unaffected by Lutyens Delhi pressures. I maintain a press cuttings file from 1968 onwards; and a statistical study of this record could provide someone with a thesis grade study into the Swamy blackout.

I recall one example of how the blackout can work. When Swamy had just returned to India and was still persona grata, the broadcasting mandarins had thought it would be a good idea to give him a slot to speak on Chinese economic issues, to be beamed by All India Radio worldwide. Although apparently the Chinese authorities jammed it, it continued for a few months during which time an influential “Lutyens Delhi” professor VP Dutt in the Delhi University Chinese field, decided that Swamy was muscling in on his monopoly to broadcast on all things Chinese. Now VP Dutt had an excellent network in the Delhi bureaucracy, the “clercs”. He lobbied with them; they said they needed some criticism of Swamy’s broadcasts. VP Dutt approached his friend, the well-known journalist Amita Malik. Amita Malik neither knew economics nor did she understand the Chinese language; but she obliged Dutt by writing an article in which she castigated Swamy’s column as “boring”.

Swamy lost the radio broadcast slot...in his defence, as anyone who has read his articles and books would endorse, I can imagine all sorts of aspersions (valid or otherwise) cast on his writing - communal, biased, right wing, slanted, downright evil -but “boring”?

Perhaps I am straying very far from this early period (the 1970s), but this may be a good place to lay before you my thesis of what finally broke the back of the Lutyens Delhi blackout: I credit it to the internet age and the development in the twenty-first century, of the private TV channels (which were no longer appendages of the Government Doordarshan).

At that time, Swamy developed a “Twitter” following. I cannot pretend to have very much knowledge of the way it functions; but Swamy studied it thoroughly, grasped what a marvellous way it was to keep in touch with a brave new open-minded world and he took to it like a duck to water. The result was that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, first hundreds and then thousands and then lakhs and finally a couple of million (it presently hovers over three million) enthusiastic, tech-savvy and terribly open-minded men and women, young and old, began to look forward to opening their day by seeing what Swamy had to say on Twitter. They would reply in their lakhs; and Swamy would personally respond as and when he found something promising and thought-provoking.

Unlike most Twitter followings of a mammoth size (I am told the record followings are those of the Prime Minister and Amitabh Bachan, both of whom hire professionals for it) Swamy’s twitters bear his own unmistakable stamp and are not conducted by some agency or website on behalf of Swamy.

I cannot help contrasting this with a feeble attempt I made in 1977 to reach out to Swamy’s then following. The Emergency had got over; there was a Janata Government in place; and the floodgates were forced open by people who had had to suppress their aspirations and grievances over the Congress years. To them, Members of Parliament like Swamy brought new hope: he was deluged with mail (in those days people could communicate only through the postal service, the rather shaky telephone services and by hand). Touched by their genuine woes, I took on the task of cataloguing and replying; but it was impossible to make any sort of meaningful dent on the flood. The more I replied, the more they wrote. After a time, reminders began to pile up. I recall on our first train trip from Delhi to Swamy’s Bombay Parliamentary constituency, I took along several tin trunk loads of correspondence in the hope that Party Workers in the Bombay North East constituency could pitch in; but it did not work out...with communication what it was in the 1970s, it could not have.

Another phenomena that played its part in breaking the back of the Swamy blackout was the development of private television news channels in the present century. Till then there was only the Government (that is effectively Congress) monopoly on the terribly insipid and uninspiring Doordarshan. I can remember that when we returned to India in 1969, the highlight of the evening programme was something called Krishi Darshan which may have enlightened the aspiring farmer but drove normal bored viewers away from their television sets in droves. Also, intellectuals with the proper political (“leftwing” and Congress) credentials were allowed unlimited access to All India Radio and Doordarshan; but naturally they too tended to bore the hell out of their audience. Otherwise almost the only good unbiased fare on offer were the vernacular film re-runs which were excellent but did not make people think deeply on matters political. Matters picked up when (I think it was in the late 1980s) there came the era of the gigantic serials, the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha: it became evident that the vast millions of Indians were deeply attached to their Hindu heritage. But even that did not revolutionise the news coverage: that had to wait for when TV was opened to private news channels and cable TV, and thinking people began to watch politically lively programmes.

The age of the evening Brains Trust (on the lines of what was already available on BBC and CNN except that our Indian Brains Trusts tend to be noisier, less Parliamentary and more dogmatic and untruthful) was established; but of course, the English main line channels (which subsist on elite advertisement of the limousine and luxury apartment and disguised liquor variety) continued to be monopolised by the “Delhi elite”. They still are; but something has forced them to bend to necessity. Vernacular TV audiences (which is of course most of India, both rural and urban and whose advertisement revenues depend on humbler products like underwear and pickles) has no particular loyalty to or empathy with the views of the Lutyens elite. Swamy began to be invited thereon.

Once these private channels discovered that Swamy had garnered a rather spectacular TRP (Television Rating Point count), they could not have enough of him. The thin edge of the wedge was inserted; to enhance their TRP, the English main line private channels were forced to feature Swamy; and the blacklisting of Subramanian Swamy is, at least for the present, very much a thing of the past.

As I was completing the last paragraph, something happened to shatter my complacency; perhaps blacklisting was not such a bad thing - at least it was restful. But there is nothing restful about the barrage of Lutyens Delhi-inspired news items about Swamy that hit the headlines in the month of June 2016.

Like a lot of Swamy’s fracas, it started out as a scholarly dispute. Sometime in the 2010s, the UPA (ie: Congress) Government, which had earlier appointed an Indian American scholar Dr Raghuram Rajan, as Chief Economic Advisor, promoted him to the very influential post of Governor of the Reserve Bank. Swamy has professional reservations about “Governor” Rajan’s (in contrast to his eight predecessors, Dr Rajan likes to be called “Governor Rajan”– an American title not commonly used in India) fiscal measures; and wrote against these even during Dr Manmohan Singh’s term as PM. Nevertheless “Governor” Rajan, who had a three-year term, continued in office even after the Modi Government was in place.

Swamy persisted in his “Governor” Rajan criticisms; but matters only came to a head when Swamy started writing against “Governor” Rajan’s getting a second term as Governor - and perhaps because of this criticism, perhaps because of a Government indication that it was quite content not to controvert Swamy’s statement, “Governor” Rajan was forced to opt out of a possible second term.

Lutyens Delhi seeing its ewe lamb being taken away, fell en-masse on the villain Swamy (particularly since he had followed it up with assorted tweets about other possible targets in the economic bureaucracy), and nasty cooked-up lurid stories about him and his due comeuppance became the headlines of the day. It might have been reasonable to have the opposition to Swamy and his views tucked away in the back pages of the Delhi Press, but that is not the Lutyens style so Delhi was regaled with Swamy headlines and news broadcasts and Evening Brains Trust sessions — not all of them necessarily truthful.

In his unique fashion, Swamy hit back. He simply refused to take any calls at all from the Media until he got an apology at least for the broadcast lie (assiduously circulated by a snake-in-office and carried uncritically by all the Lutyens Media) that Swamy had been called in and hauled up by the PM for this crime. But the Media, seeing its TRPs slipping away, would not take no for an answer.

Hordes of journalists and their dish-ornamented vans blocked the road in front of our home; his mobiles rang and rang though Swamy determinedly refused to accept Press calls, and for two days whenever Swamy left the house, his security had to smuggle him out through the servant’s entrance. From the perspective of the “non-person”’s family, there is a lot to be said in favour of the anonymity inflicted on the “non-person”; but unfortunately that is not Swamy’s style.

Swamy’s strategy has worked. Within two months, most of the Media have made the demanded peace offering; and you can once more see Subramanian Swamy grinning in person on TV instead of merely the scrolled announcement “Subramanian Swamy says this or that”.

Evolving with Subramanian Swamy - A roller coaster ride
Publisher: Roxna Swamy
Price: Rs 699