by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The name may be Bond, James Bond, but there is always an 'M' in distant London, the super-boss of the MI6, who dictates each of his moves like a puppeteer to the puppet.
Subramaniam Swamy is always as combat-ready as the fictional British spy, but the question that is increasingly being asked is—who is his 'M'? Swamy's targets are of course as varied as that of Bond—from Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa to Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, Chief Economic Advisor to government Arvind Subramaniam, Economic Affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi, not to speak of Arun Jaitley, finance minister who's regarded to be Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Man Friday, and finally may be Modi himself. Like Bond, Swamy chases his prey carefully. Unlike Bond, however, his weapon is not the Colt automatic. Swamy's choice of weapon is either his Twitter handle or the courtroom and he targets not his quarry's life but his reputation. Unlike Bond, again, Swamy's success rate is poor. In his courtroom skirmishes, it is only Jayalalithaa whom he can claim to be his trophy, though the canny lady had the last laugh at the hustings. But his Twitter campaign against politicians and officials of repute have claimed a casualty, RBI chief Rajan, who has announced that he'd rather go back to his academic roots as a professor of Chicago University after his term ends in September.
Nevertheless, Rajan, Arvind Subramaniam and Das are all soft targets so it was obvious that Swamy was aiming at none other than finance minister Jaitley, an intention which he made obvious in his trademark style by tweeting that the minister photographed in a lounge suit in Beijing was looking like a "waiter". Swamy obviously kept the deniability option open as he did not mention Jaitley by name. But it was clearly in retaliation to Jaitley's strong but muted remark that Swamy's attacks on officials of his ministry were "unfair and false". The "waiter" jibe came after that. Then Prime Minister Modi appeared on the scene. In a TV interview to a private channel, the first since he became PM two years ago, he indirectly snubbed Swamy for his "fondness for publicity". But Swamy's ego-balloon refused to come down. Using foul words, he stooped to talking about an "unelectable dog", the word unelectable could logically be alluding to Jaitley's famous defeat in 2014 Lok Sabha poll. Last Friday, he attacked the Prime Minister himself on Twitter, mocking him for his acche din election slogan and saying there would be a "furore" if he disclosed the "real GDP growth figure" by using "Samuelson-Swamy Index". The swagger comes from a 1974 paper in the American Economic Review on indexing by Nobel-winning economist Paul Samuelson with him. The subtext to all this is obvious; he cares the least about whose prestige he is treading on but he is still a BJP Rajya Sabha member.
Meanwhile, campaign against Sonia and Rahul is no longer his priority: the link to the "National Herald case" against them has been dropped from his website. So Swamy is now a full-time Modi baiter. In the past, when lawyer Ram Jethmalani had crossed the line in attacking Modi and Jaitley, he got promptly expelled from the party. Who is Swamy's almighty protector issuing him the licence to defame everyone? Everyone seems baffled. Some liberal intellectuals pontificate that Swamy has the backing of a section of RSS though it is too well-known that Mohan Bhagwat, the Sangh chief, has no direct link with him. In the earlier NDA regime under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Swamy had indeed tried to slip into the cabinet edgeways for his loud Hindu chauvinist public assertions.
But being leader of Janata Party, a letterhead organization and his untrustworthy conduct in the past, Vajpayee kept him at arm's length. But why Modi nominated him to the Rajya Sabha and kept granting personal audience whenever he wanted. In fact, Modi met Swamy after he attacked Rajan. But said in a jovial manner,“Ab Ess Umar Mein Sher Apni Chaal Thode Hi Badalta Hai” (One can’t expect a tiger like you to change your strives at this age either). If Modi knew Swamy’s traits, why he nominated him to the Rajya Sabha or who paved the way for him to enter Rajya Sabha ?
I suspect the answer lies in the inexplicable reluctance among bigwigs including Modi to take appropriate disciplinary action against such a pain in the neck. Modi is not a weak leader like Manmohan Singh. He surely has strong links in the RSS but there is no evidence that he compromises his authority as PM to anyone. On the other hand, the inexplicable admission of Swamy first into BJP (by merging his Janata Party) and to Rajya Sabha is reminiscent of many such lateral entries in the Congress era. It happened specially with Pranab Mukherjee, presently President of India, whom two successive Congress prime ministers, Rajiv Gandhi and P. V. Narasimha Rao didn’t like for most of their tenures (he got the charge of Commerce Ministry towards the fag end of Rao’s rule). But, elections became increasingly expensive. With open and secret corporate funding of polls the order of the day, Mukherjee’s friends in the industrial world helped his inclusion in the UPA government as a powerful minister, with the charge of the key finance ministry between 2009 and 2013.
His corporate benefactors are known to have wanted him as PM in 2013 but the Congress party finally put its foot down. As he moved to the gilded cage of Rashtrapati Bhavan, his backers cut off money supply to Congress. Under Modi, “crony capitalists” are unhappy. Serious efforts are on to unearth black money and recover NDAs. Efforts by the corporate sector to infiltrate the government and ferret out key information have been curbed. Auction of natural resources has been streamlined to eliminate tendering manipulations. With more FDI permitted, local monopolists can now feel the heat of competition. That’s perhaps the reason why the ‘M’s of the corporate world have dusted an out-of-work agents and put him on a mission to shoot threat tweets.
