This is no ordinary Swamy

Harish Khare

Being married to Subramanian Swamy could never have been an easy walk in the Lodhi Gardens. To remain married for 50 years to this very, very difficult man must have taken some doing - and, large and undrying reservoirs of intellectual fortitude and personal rectitude, and a bit of Parsi commonsense. That Roxna Swamy should now go public with her undiminished admiration for this maverick reaffirms the old adage about love being blind. What we get is a deliciously malevolent book-size pamphlet, about political chicanery and knavery these last four decades.

And, never mind that Evolving with Subramanian Swamy — A Roller Coaster Ride is a one-sided, totally partisan, biased and motivated take. But then, Mr and Mrs Swamy have lived — as they say in the Chinese curse — in interesting times. 

The first thing to be noted about the book is that Mrs Roxna Swamy apparently could not find any publisher to touch it with that proverbial barge pole. Publishers are a prudent tribe, and they also have legal departments to vet manuscripts for libel. This book could not possibly survive a decent scrutiny even by a junior legal counsel. And that is, perhaps, what makes it such a distastefully scrumptious reading. 

So, undeterred, Mrs Swamy has published the book on her own. She comes out as an equal partner in her husband’s “crimes”. This is not exactly a Mr and Mrs Smith in the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie class, though there is plenty of action, replete with accusations, allegations. Reading her war stories, it is more like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting, two conmen living by their wits and their cunning, getting the better of their rivals. With a sparkling glee, she takes as many as three pages to list all the legal cases Swamy has got entangled in; taking on all and sundry, no reputation is beyond Swamy’s besmirching reach. The theme song of the book is her unwavering admiration and fascination with Dr Swamy as he took on his ‘enemies’; as Mrs Swamy saw it, righteousness, facts, history, logic, ethics, law were on her husband’s side. Always. He was invariably right, never wrong; and still, very honourable and very noble. 

Secondly, there is one and only one fixation in the book: Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Mrs Swamy has a very, very huge score to settle with the former prime minister, whom she describes as a “small, mean, envious and malicious” man. She wants to believe that Vajpayee did everything possible to keep her husband down. “The man (Vajpayee) has known all along that Swamy is a better man; and he has done all he can to victimize him (Swamy) and keep him out.” Despite this unrelenting hostility and unsparing malevolence from Vajpayee, a “resilient and unshakable” Swamy has “survived and flourished.” Mrs Swamy takes a particularly vicarious pleasure at recounting what she thinks were the Chinese’s deliberate attempts to humiliate the then Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee during his visit to Beijing in February 1979 (in contrast to the reddest of red carpets rolled out for a non-official Swamy a few months earlier). 

Thirdly, Mrs Swamy paints a very, very unflattering picture of the RSS and its organisational capacity for meanness towards Swamy at Vajpayee’s diktat. She has a chilling tale to tell as to how the entire swayamsevak fraternity could turn its back on her husband and become unfeeling, insensitive and uncaring towards a man they once welcomed so warmly in their homes. “It was almost like being thrown out of a medieval caste set-up, with “hookah pani bandh”. But she now thinks it is a new “reconstituted and more just RSS” that has seen to it that Swamy was not kept out of the BJP.

Mrs Swamy has taken the hatchet to very many people, but she wields the heftiest at Yashwant Sinha. Maybe, if the next non-BJP government has even one-fifth of the vindictiveness of the present regime, it could use Mrs Swamy’s book to institute a CBI inquiry against the former finance minister. 

Mr and Mrs Swamy belonged to an India of low intrigue and petty conspiracy of small men and women. We now have a New India. And, I am afraid there will be no appreciation of Dr Swamy’s talent and experience and wisdom; the only use the clever and cunning men who preside over our nation will have for Dr Swamy is for his unrivalled gift for getting under political rivals' skin. 

Still, thank you, Mrs Swamy for writing this singularly biting book — and, for being so very careful not to give offence to the most powerful men in the land. A bit of Parsi commonsense. 

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I note with sorrow the passing away a few days ago of my friend and eminent constitutional lawyer, Pavani Parameswara Rao. I have the privilege of knowing Rao sahib for over two decades and during this time, he was my occasional tutor in matters of the constitutional law. 

I had met Rao sahib only a week ago at a dinner in honour of the former President, Pranab Mukherjee, and he seemed to have recovered from his illness. He had promised to give me the lowdown about all that was happening in the judiciary. That lesson will remain undelivered. 

He was not known for his flamboyant court-craft but was widely respected for his steady and solid homework. As a lawyer, he believed strongly that the benefit of quality legal counsel should be available to every accused — that, he felt, was the essence of rule of law. No accused should be held guilty or punished without the services of a good defence.

I remember once we were at the India International Centre. He had taken up a brief for the late Ms Jayalalithaa. The former chief minister of Tamil Nadu was a particularly disagreeable person at that time and was involved in a case of disproportionate assets. As we were chatting, a lady accosted him, challengingly asking him how he could take up a brief for a corrupt person; Rao sahib disarmingly replied: “Madam, I am a servant of the law.”

Rao sahib and I found ourselves on the same wavelength on most of the issues, except one: former Chief Justice K Subba Rao. He was a great admirer of him; I thought he had done a great disservice to the judiciary and its image as an institution above political partisanship when as chief justice, he had allowed himself to receive a delegation of Opposition leaders and, then, agreed to become their Presidential candidate against Dr Zakir Hussain. The first stone had been cast and it was unfortunately cast by a judge, not by a politician. The itch of “committed judiciary” came as a reaction. 

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A few weeks ago, I had mentioned in this space how the advantage of having a CBI office in Chandigarh just half a block away from my residence was turning out to be a mixed blessing in the aftermath of Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s followers’ roadshow. Even after three weeks, there is an intrusive police presence to guard the CBI officials.

And, it is particularly jarring to see the uniformed men sprawling and spreading themselves around in the neighbourhood park. There is a sense of unnaturalness, as CRPF men have been replaced by the RAF contingent. 

That apart, I am alarmed to see all of them, glued, to a man, to their smartphones. I do hope that the senior security brass is aware of the dangers of this rampant exposure of the men in uniform to mental and emotional contamination involved. Conventionally, the men in uniform have been sought to be systematically insulated from extraneous factors. In fact, the Indian security establishment takes considerable pride in instilling a robust professionalism among men and women in uniform; but, the sober and sensible leaders ought to be concerned over this creeping but decidedly unhelpful exposure to all the venom that the social media offers. 

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Seeing the photographs of Capt Amarinder Singh in London, I think the Chief Minister definitely needs a new tailor. And, he can also do with a bracing cup of coffee. 

Join me. 

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