The hate affair: Subramanian Swamy vs Sonia Gandhi

Dr Subramanian Swamy just got closer to his most ardent dream – a day in court with the Gandhis.

The latest summons to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and other Congress bigwigs is in connection with the National Herald case. Basically Swamy is accusing Sonia, Rahul and other Congress leaders of conspiring to cheat and misappropriate funds by paying Rs 50 lakh which allows the Young Indian Ltd company to acquire the Associated Journals Ltd, the publisher of the defunct National Herald newspaper. As the judge issuing the summons put it :

From the complaint and the evidence led so far it appears YI (Young Indian) was in fact created as a sham or a cloak to convert public money to personal use or as a special purpose vehicle for acquiring control over Rs2,000 crore worth of assets.

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The Congress, not surprisingly, is shouting that it will not be “cowed down by such revengeful witchhunts”.

But whatever happens on August 7, the day the Gandhis have been summoned to appear, Swamy is triumphant. The man might be a politician and have taught at Harvard but the two areas which are his favourite arenas are Twitter and the court.

And he is taking to the former to gloat about the latter.

Swamy is never shy of placing himself firmly in a historical context.

On June 26, 1975, the nation woke up to Gandhis sending people to jail outside the rule of law. On June 26, 2014 the Gandhis woke up to….?

And in case you were not sure what the Gandhis woke up to, Swamy elaborates helpfully:

TDK and Buddhu cutting short their vacation abroad and rushing back on 29th.

For the uninitiated that’s Swamy-speak for Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.And Swamy isn’t just relying on the courts. He is a man of action himself.

My legal eagles now in Zurich located two accts of TDK & one of Buddhu. Chm of bank is my fmr Harvard student. So I will visit Swiss in Aug.

It appears that ignored by the new NDA government when it assigned the ministries, Swamy has given himself the portfolio of Cabinet Minister in charge of Gandhis. Swamy-watchers surely remember that after he rejoined the BJP there were rumours that he would be India’s next Finance Minister. And he is not shy to assign work to the man who got the job.

Jaitely can order investigation under Income Tax Act against TDK for misusing party funds in the NH case as per my letter to him. Will he?

The “Will he?” sounds like a bit of daring challenge because it’s clear that even though he is now part of the BJP, as far as the Gandhis are concerned Swamy is a one-man army – a Terminator.

Swamy’s antipathy for Gandhis is well-known and no secret. Modi might have mocked Madam and Shahzada on the campaign trail but he went out of his way to greet them with warmth in the Lok Sabha after the election was over. Swamy is made of sterner and more implacable stuff. When he does not call her TDK he insists on calling Sonia, Sonia Maino and when he does not call Rahul “buddhu” he calls him Raul Vinci. He’s called “Sonia-ji and Rahul-ji” the 2Gs of the 2G scam.

In a profile for Tehelka, Ashok Malik writes “These twin identities — overstated Hindu nationalism and an opposition to the Congress, specifically Sonia Gandhi — have become Swamy’s calling card.

But neither comes naturally to him. “ The man’s political career has seen more ideological hairpin bends than National Highway 17” writes Prem Panicker in a 1998 profile on Rediff.com. In 1991 he said “I think the BJP is a joke. It is a party of semi-literates, and has fascist tendencies. Such a party can never have real roots in India because Hinduism is the antithesis of fascism.”

What few remember is that after Indira Gandhi’s assassination Swamy was actually close to Rajiv. As Samanth Subramanian writes in Caravan:

Rajiv would meet him, Swamy said, at 2 am or 3 am, and “we talked about everything … In his first term as prime minister, he was terrible. But he would have been a very, very good second-term prime minister … He had matured a great deal.”

At one time his main enemy was not the Gandhis but the RSS and Vajpayee. He blamed Vajpayee for denying him the finance minister post in the Morarji Desai government. Samanth Subramanian writes that Swamy claimed Vajpayee spread a rumour that he was a CIA agent and Swamy in his memoir struck back by calling Vajpayee a drunk. No surprise he didn’t make it to the Vajpayee cabinet either as finance minister or foreign minister.

In 1998 however he told Rediff.com:“It is wrong to say that Vajpayee is bitterly against me. It is the RSS which is most bitterly against me. They want to finish me off. They don’t realise that I am indestructible.”

At that time Sonia was the enemy of his enemy. Swamy, writes Malik walked into Sonia Gandhi’s office one day and heard her tell him “I believe you want to bring down this government. So do I.” Then he hosted a famous tea party at a Delhi hotel where he invited both Sonia and Jayalalithaa. Soon AIADMK withdrew its support to the Vajpayee government and it fell.

Swamy even claims Sonia “promised to back (or even have her MPs join) a non-Congress, non-BJP led government with him as prime minister.” But that came to naught.

And somewhere along the way he turned virulently against Sonia. The National Herald case in a way is just a corruption case. He has accused Sonia and her family of contracting the LTTE to kill Rajiv Gandhi. He alleges, writes Malik, that the Bofors kickbacks went to Sonia Gandhi’s family not to Rajiv. In 2011 he filed a 206-page petition with Manmohan Singh seeking permission to prosecute Sonia Gandhi.

Swamy’s first head-but with Sonia Gandhi happened long before she entered politics. Indira Gandhi was then the prime minister and on a major anti-corruption crusade. Panicker writes Swamy cornered her in Parliament providing documentary evidence that Sonia, then just the elder bahu, was “was at the time functioning as a benami insurance agent for Oriental Fire and General Insurance Company, and had in fact given her office address as 1, Safdarjung Road – the prime minister’s official residence.” Mrs Gandhi was forced to get Sonia to give up that ‘employment’.

Much water has flown down the Ganga since then but in a career filled with “hairpin bends” and U-turns, Sonia Gandhi has remained his enduring crusade. Now he is going to get his day in court. And he is gleeful but the tweet he sent out was double-edged.

If I can do this in NH case without power of office why can’t those with power prosecute TDK and send her to Tihar?

Swamy is part of the party “with power”. But his tweet sounds like a man smarting from being ignored by the Modi sarkar. The National Herald summons is turning into Swamy’s gauntlet not just to the Gandhis but also to the government led by his own party in Delhi.