V. SUDERSHAN / THE HINDU ARCHIVES
Swamy
addressing reporters on 2 February outside the Supreme Court after the
announcement of the verdict on the 2G case. Swamy’s efforts in filing
cases against corruption related to the 2G scam led to the dismissal and
prosecution of former telecom minister A Raja.
TO SEE SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY in his natural habitat is
emphatically not to see him thus: in the heart of a throng of Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) workers, on a January morning, in the town of
Dhar, in Madhya Pradesh. Mere minutes after 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 forehead like an angry wound. Then he reappeared atop a
jalopy that had been converted, with the judicious aid of a silvered
backboard, silvered side panels and a cloth-covered bench, into a
motorised chariot. The crowd disciplined itself into a column and began
to trickle through the streets of Dhar. A small boy sat sideways 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
uncomfortable 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 the town had visited him in Delhi in early 2010 to
ask if he would take up the case 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 Museum 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 Panchami, they have this big rally in Dhar, so that’s where
we’re going. I’m kind of a chief guest there.”The Basant Panchami rally every spring has, for a couple of decades now, thrummed with communal tension. On the grounds of the Bhojashala is a dargah, also several centuries old, one of its green-and-white walls pressing up against the sandstone perimeter of the Bhojashala. The local police and the Madhya Pradesh government have tried, with varying degrees of sincerity and opportunism, to regulate the entry of Hindu and Muslim pilgrims into this complex; at the moment, Hindus pray on Tuesdays and on Basant Panchami, while Muslims pray on Fridays. The RSS has demanded, through repeated agitations, that the Bhojashala remain permanently open to Hindus—and, implicitly, closed to Muslims. “There have been lathi charges, 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 extraordinarily colourful local weekly, told me before the rally. In 2006, Friday and Basant Panchami fell on the same day; Dhar’s Muslims were supposed to pray until 1 pm, 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 Panchami would again land on a Friday.
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 details 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 the owner. I am just the trustee,” Swamy told me. “The House of Lords surprisingly upheld our view.” He maintained also that the British Museum’s charter allowed it to return 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, which governs the administration of the museum’s possessions; in fact, the Act stoutly 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 second 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 enormous portrait of the Vagdevi, chugging through the tight streets. Antsy policemen lined either side of the road, and on the odd corner, idling Rapid Action Force vans exhaled sharp bursts of exhaust fumes, like sighs of impatience. When the procession entered the edges of Dhar’s Muslim quarter, I saw its residents peering down from balconies or sitting on the stoops of their shops, their faces carefully and stoically composed. There were, as seems almost mandatory with such events, trumpets and drums, their earsplitting notes of forced cheer barely able to mask the town’s sour sense of worry. Leading the procession, a clump of young men, their heads snugly hugged by saffron bandannas, raised one slogan repeatedly: “Bhojashala hamari hai”—The Bhojashala is ours.
It seemed to be an act of cosmic wryness that Swamy had been pulled into the orbit of the legacy of Bhoj, who ruled Malwa for nearly half of the 11th century. Bhoj was known as a scholar of enviable talents; he wrote treatises—84 in all—on medicine, chemistry, civil engineering, Sanskrit grammar, shipbuilding and law, several of which have survived to the present day. He was, however, inept at building political alliances, and much of his life was spent in campaigns against foes who 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 notable 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 than 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, Swamy’s qualifications for politics and policymaking are striking, almost extravagant. In practice, they have been rendered inert by a process that says much about Swamy. “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 nature of the ascent to Indian political power, which resembles not so much a long ladder as a greased pole.
A remarkable concatenation of circumstances has now given Swamy a hotter national profile than he has enjoyed at any time since the mid-1970s, when he became famous 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 involving the misallocation of spectrum for 2G mobile services, deposed A Raja as telecommunications minister and may yet yank down P Chidambaram from the top of the home 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 New Delhi establishment, the improbable status of an outsider. His Janata Party was inducted into the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in March, a senior Bharatiya 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, vitiated 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 especially 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 sounded like fantastical conspiracies. But in this era of the Niira Radia tapes and 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 its leaders, and that cannot figure out the dividing line, in its conception of corruption, between the possible and the outlandish.
Source: http://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/outlier
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