The killer instinct & enemies of Dr Subramaniam swamy

The killer instinct & enemies of Dr Subramaniam swamy 

written by Dr subramanian swamy 

I am quite embarrassed when perfect strangers accost me nowadays in air flights to ask me who is my "next target" for political annihilation; or when my friends meet me in the Central Hall of Parliament to inquire if I could set my "gun sights" on someone they do not like, as if I am some kind of Clint Eastwood who single-handedly can destroy someone, or at least his reputation.

I am embarrassed because I was brought up instead to be a soft intellectual,  who having secured a Ph.D in Economics at Harvard, became a teacher in the same world famous university for ten years, and who went to do research jointly with two of the world's most famous economists Nobel Laureates Paul A Samuelson and Simon Kuznets. I was so well-regarded that- when I was defeated in my third-term Lok Sabha bid from Bombay- Harvard University , despite my absence from academics for 15 years - promptly re-invited me to come back to teach (which I did for two years, 1985-86).

Now this intellectual attainment does not square up with the Hollywood Clint Eastwood image, nor am I happy to have that image. I am in politics for certain well defined ideology, which ideology happily has been internationalized today by all the major political parties. For the last 25 years I have advocated that the Indian Government adopt a market economy, rectify the pro-USSR tilt and balance out the foreign policy to befriend  USA, Israel and China, and to motivate a cultural renaissance especially in the Hindu community.

But media appetite is not for such heavy ideological matters. Thus, for no fault of mine, my quarrels and political blood-spilling have received much more media attention. And ever since I campaigned and was successful in dethroning Jayalalitha, at the heels of demolishing Ramakrishna Hegde, these unwanted enquires about my "next target" have become legion.

I have as a philosophy never 'targeted' anyone. I have only defended myself against harassment, sidelining or attempted political elimination. But my defence has been vigorous, systematic, and effective to the point that the attacker has been either immobilized, or discredited, or politically disabled. In turn, this had tended to create the media impression that I am "making trouble", when in fact as the prey I have not simply taken things lying down. But I have never made the first 'strike' against anyone.

As a further norm of my philosophy, I have never sought to demolish any honest critic; nor it is my duty to expose to destroy any and every corrupt person. It is the duty of the government and of the people to elect such a government, to prosecute all corrupt persons without fear or favour. As a public person, I can effectively fight corruption only with the state apparatus. Without government office, an individual can do only so much. Therefore one has to be selective. Obviously those corrupt persons who seek to harm me are the obvious candidates for selection.

It has been my lot throughout my life to be confronted and to confront the corrupt and powerful. As a student for my Masters degree in the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Calcutta, the then Chairman, P.C.Mahalanobis took a dislike to me because he and my father were rivals in the  government statistical organisation. Mahalanobis was a corrupt leftist. I had come to the ISI as an innocent student with a brilliant first class B.A. Honours degree in mathematics. But Mahalanobis' dislike of me filtered down to the professors. For no reason except to please him, they began failing me in every subject. A ruined career stared me in the face. So I decided to retaliate ( a foolish resolve on first thought, since I was then a 19 year old student facing the darling of the Left, USSR and Nehru: P.C.Mahalanobis). But I dropped everything, parked myself in the library, and read whatever Mahalanobis had written as a scholar. I found that his celebrated Second Five Year Plan model, the so-called Mahalanobis model, was actually stolen from M.A.Feldman, an obscure Soviet economist of the 1930s. This discovery I could not use against Mahalanobis however, because neither the USSR nor the then docile Indian press would take notice. But I discovered that Mahalanobis’s magnum opus something called 'Fractile Analysis', had recently been published in a scholarly international journal. That research was, I found worthless when scrutinized under the microscope of modern mathematics. It was, literally, well-known earlier research re-hashed. Mathematics laid bare the plagiarism. Mahalanobis was too big to be challenged by other Indian scholars. But I had nothing to lose.

Naturally when I wrote out my critique and set it to the journal, it was hot stuff. The journal published it, and asked Mahalanobis for a rejoinder. He had none. His reputation abroad was therefore in tatters. He never recovered from it. A 19 year old writing out complex mathematical equations was a novelty for Harvard's Economics Department to whose notice the journal article came. They offered me a scholarship for a Ph.D Course. My ruined career prospects did a 180 turn! I never looked back thereafter. Had I not been cornered like a cat, I would never have ventured to demolish Mahalanobis.

The same problem I faced, years later, with Ramakrishna Hegde. Hegde belonged to that class of politicians who practice bogus humility to impress the middle class, who engage in sham intellectualism by having articles and books ghost written for a price to make society ladies going 'ooh aah' at the India International Centre, and behind it all are mediocre crooks.

From day 1 of the Janata Party formation in 1977, Hegde was consumed by jealousy. I was already a middle class hero then because of my anti-Emergency struggle, and was a former Harvard University Professor to boot, of genuine intellectual credentials. I did not have to be synthetic in anyway for all the things that Hegde had to be. From 1977 to 1984, he harassed me in Indian style par excellence: pin pricking. Finally he managed to put me against Chandrasekhar, who in a fit of rage as he was prone to, expelled me from the Janata Party. Hegde went on to become the Chief Minister of Karnataka on Chandrashekar's political largesse, and then turned against him too. I returned to the Janata Party after patching up with Chandrasekhar. During the period of six years 1983-1988 as Chief Minister, Hegde had lost his head. His media con-tricks made him a middle class hero. But behind the stage, he was committing one corrupt act after another in the mistaken belief that if had Rs.1000 Crores in loot, he could buy his way to the Prime Ministership. By the time I returned to the Janata Party, I had studied and documented three of Hedge’s major cases of corruption or misuse of power which I made public: Telephone Tapping [later proved by a parliamentary probe], Bangalore Land Grab for his son-in-law (1000 acres) [later proved by Justice Kuldip Singh Commission], and Illegal Commission collecting in the sale of torpedoes in the HDW submarine [confirmed by Corp of Detectives (COD) Karnataka Government investigation]. Since 1990, when V.P.Singh asked him to quit his Planning Commission Deputy Chairmanship after the Kuldip Singh Commission Report was submitted, Hegde has remained a political leper. He cannot now get out that rut, because the synthetic moral halo that he contrived to wear has vanished.

The fight with Ms.Jayalalitha was the toughest of my life. It also took the longest (3 - 1/2 years) time. It was the toughest because unlike other 'targets' there was no counter veiling power to ensure some kind of 'level-playing field'. In case of Mahalanobis, it was the international community of scholars, whom I could address. They did not depend on Mahalanobis for research grants. Indian scholars in economics were a castrated lot since they depended on the government for grants and positions. In Hegde's case, Rajiv Gandhi's central government was a buffer. If I came up with queries, they were ready to answer, as in the case of Telephone Tapping or in appointing Kuldip Singh Commission. In Ms.Jayalalitha's case, all the political parties were politically wooing her, or eyeing her booty. That is why practically every party from BJP to CPM filed affidavits in the Supreme Court supporting her stand that a Governor has no locus stand to give sanction to prosecute a Chief Minister after Dr.Chenna Reddy had given me sanction to prosecute Ms.Jayalalitha. Now they are to rue their stand in the Laloo Yadav issue. The Central government headed by Narasimha Rao was most reluctant to be of help, because Mr.Rao's son and confidants were all being effectively 'serviced' by her people. When Mr.Rao appointed me to head a GATT Commission in 1994, even Moopanar and Chidamabaram tried to organize a signature campaign in the Congress Parliamentary Party against my appointment because it would, in Chidambaram's words send a wrong signal to Ms.Jayalalitha, with whom they were at that time as late as February 1996 on best behaviour. Such was the array of forces in favour of Ms.Jayalalitha. That is why it was so tough to fight her. During my struggle against her, Karunanidhi hid in Gopalapuram most of the time.

But the breakthrough in my campaign against Ms.Jayalalitha came by the inexorable law of fermentation: if you keep hammering away, and it is the truth, then the people will sooner or later revolt. Day in and day out, I brought out one fact out after another. My old school boy and teacher-student network fed me with  document and data. Press conference and Court writ petitions did the rest,  Ms.Jayalalitha's attempt to foist false cases on me only re-affirmed the substance of my campaign against her. When the General Elections came,  people spoke.

But Ms.Jayalalitha during her tenure as Chief Minister tried to get me to jail in a number of ridiculous cases. One was under TADA by faking a photograph, another was under the severe Protection of Civil Rights Act [PCRA] for abusing the scheduled castes-- by calling the LTTE as an "international pariah!", and yet another for attempting to murder her!! Each time the Supreme Court came to my rescue.

I had therefore no option but to go after my political predator, and immobilize her. But lacking a developed Party cadre, I could not cash the public popularity I thus got. The political zamindars (and in reality too), Karunanidhi and Moopanar came out of their hibernation, and harvested the wave I generated by my struggle, But they are no better than her. They are trying now to silence me by the same methods, only less skilfully. I am therefore again not without a target. Fortunately, each time my predators make the mistake of underestimating me. And I with each success, have acquired a more experienced killer instinct.

V.P.Singh : My enemy

I first met V.P.Singh when I entered Parliament as an MP in 1974. He was then a Deputy Minister in Indira Gandhi's government. I had already made a name opposing Indira Gandhi's so-called socialist policies (which policies had meant only more only more government control and harassment to the public), and hence as a more prominent MP I took little notice of the then lesser known V.P.Singh. He too was very low profile in Parliament and hardly spoke on any subject even though he was a Minister. Between 1974 and 1980 therefore Mr.V.P.Singh was hardly noticed by anyone. In 1980, Sanjay Gandhi suddenly made him Chief Minister of UP, because V.P.Singh was during the Janata Government period, a loyal sycophant of Sanjay. In fact on Sanjay's death in 1980 he coined the phrase in Hindi which translated means: "Till there is a sun and moon, there will be Sanjay's name blazing". Many were sickened by this sycophancy. In 1981, he suddenly resigned from the CM's post to boost his image thinking that Mrs.Gandhi, distraught and depressed by Sanjay's death and because of his sycophancy to Sanjay's memory would reject his resignation. But she saw through his game and promptly asked the governor to accept his resignation, and he was out of the CM's post. Thereafter, I again began to see V.P.Singh in the Central Hall of Parliament, this time singing praises of Mrs.Gandhi. Obviously this had its effect on Mrs.Gandhi because soon he was made Commerce Minister. When I got the Chinese to re-open the Kailash Manasarovar route, and was selected by Mrs.Gandhi to be the first Indian to go as a pilgrim to that holy spot in 1981, she sent Mr.V.P.Singh to see me off at the departure point in Delhi. I got to know him better on that occasion, and after that, I met V.P.Singh regularly on some occasion or another in Delhi or Lucknow. But I never became close because I distrusted him. In September 1986, I had met Rajiv Gandhi prior to my visit to Pakistan. He asked me as to what I thought of V.P.Singh performance in the first GATT conference that had been held in Uruguay. I told him that V.P.Singh had surrendered on all points in the proposed new GATT agreement to the United States, and hence he has become very popular with the American government and media. In fact he was being projected as the next 'Prime Minister' by the Americans. I told Rajiv that the Americans were unhappy with him (Rajiv) because he was increasing defense expenditure in a big way, and the Russians too were not happy because he was ordering purchase of weapons from countries other that USSR. His mother, Indira Gandhi bought all the weapons from the Russians. Rajiv Gandhi nodded in agreement with me in a manner that made me feel that all was not well between him and V.P.Singh. In March 1987, V.P.Singh resigned his Defense Ministership (to which portfolio he had been shifted from Finance in January of that year for approving income Tax raids on Amitabh Bachan) after announcing an inquiry into the purchase of submarines from Germany. Soon he was expelled from the Congress Party. At that moment, I was also an expelled member of the Janata Party, but Chandrasekhar and I were on the point of becoming friends, and I was about to be re-admitted to the Janata Party. Chandrasekhar had immense dislike of V.P.Singh, and V.P.Singh too sensed Chandrasekhar as a rival to be sidelined. Therefore, one day in early 1988 V.P.Singh invited me for tea, The purpose was to dissuade me from my efforts in making my friend Ajit Singh join the Janata Party, which would strengthen Chandrasekhar. At tea, it became clear that V.P.Singh had teamed up with Ramakrishna Hegde to try and capture the Janata Party. I told V.P.Singh that if Rajiv Gandhi was corrupt, Hegde was ten times more corrupt. I told him that in the HDW submarine deal in which he had as Defense Minister ordered an inquiry, Mr.Hegde too was involved. Hegde as Chief Minister made state Public Sector firm NGEF enter into a collaboration with AEG of Germany, and in the name of supplying torpedoes for the submarines had collected Rs.3 Crores as commission, which was illegal. I also told him of the land racket of Hegde by which his son-in-law got 5000 acres of government land in Bangalore and elsewhere, and about the telephone tapping he ordered of his own Ministers including Deve Gowda. V.P.Singh told me that he would find out about my allegations. He never bothered to. On the contrary he got even more close to Hegde because Hegde had begun to finance V.P.Singh, Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammed Khan, the Jan Morcha trio, for their political activities. Soon, V.P.Singh and Hegde stepped up their campaign to merge the Janata Party and Lok Dal to form the Janata Dal. At first Chandrasekhar resisted the idea, and so did H.N.Bahuguna of the Lok Dal. But Bahuguna soon thereafter died of a heart attack. Chandrasekhar too lost his nerve when Ajit Singh did a somersault and was left all alone. When the merger was announced, I was isolated as all the  big leaders of Janata Party crossed over to Janata Dal headed by V.P.Singh. I was shocked that so many senior leaders who suffered in the Emergency were ready to desert the Janata Party which brought democracy back to the people, and were ready to accept the leadership of V.P.Singh who was a sycophant of the Emergency terrorist Mr.Sanjay Gandhi. V.P.Singh also had stabbed Rajiv Gandhi in the back by using the Finance Ministry to boost his own image. I still remember the sad scene of a 80 year old Kirloskar, a gentleman industrialist with a Masters degree from the world famous MIT, being asked to report to a police station at 2 AM in the morning because V.P.Singh had ordered that he be prosecuted under the criminal law for what turned out to be a minor tax evasion. This boosted V.P.Singh's image as a great crusader against the high and mighty. But V.P.Singh would not treat Ram Nath Goenka on the same principle,  because Goenka was opposed to Rajiv Gandhi while Kirloskar was pro-Rajiv. But people were so shocked by the Bofors scandal, that they overlooked any fault of V.P.Singh. In fact people even began to think that Bofors scam was exposed by V.P.Singh when infact it was a pro-communist peace group in Swedan which was responsible for the expose. Later, another Communist, Ms.Chitra Subramaniam with the full support of yet another CPM sympathizer N.Ram of Hindu newspaper fully exposed the bribery in it. V.P.Singh played no role in exposing it at all. On the contrary, when later I became Minister, and Chandrasekhar made over to me all the Bofors files, I discovered that V.P.Singh as Finance Minister had led the first secret negotiation with Bofors on behalf of Rajiv Gandhi in Stockholm on June 10, 1985. Yet V.P.Singh maintained publicly that he knew nothing about the Bofors deal till it came up for Cabinet approval in March 1986! The press was so infatuated with V.P.Singh that they refused to publish my press conference where I made this allegation against V.P.Singh. It is not that I am alleging V.P.Singh also received bribes from Bofors, but that he knew all along about the deal. No deal by government of over Rs.50 Crores can be cleared without Finance Minister's approval. This deal was worth Rs.1700 Crores, and V.P.Singh was not only Finance Minister but later Defence Minister as well. He should have known, and he had approved the deal as well, yet he lied to the public that he knew nothing about it. But Rajiv Gandhi was surrounded by persons all whom had benefited by Bofors. So they were all too scared to confront V.P.Singh with this fact before a hostile press. So they bungled and bungled, and finally when the Lok Sabha elections came in 1989, the people defeated the Congress Party. After V.P.Singh became PM, he began to go slow on Bofors. At first he said that he will reveal all within 15 days. Nothing happened for 60 days. I knew that because of his involvement in the negotiations and his Minister Mr.Arun Nehru's full participation in the bribery, V.P.Singh did not want to speed up the probe. Therefore, I began raising the issue in Parliament in a big way on the delay in the Bofors investigation, and openly charged V.P.Singh and Arun Nehru of being afraid. The net result of my attack was that V.P.Singh went on the defensive. As a consequence, Rajiv Gandhi picked up courage, and even once challenged V.P.Singh to lay on the table of the Lok Sabha all the Bofors papers in the PMO.  Rajiv himself told me that because of my attack, the whole climate in Parliament had changed. He said: "If my Congress MPs had one tenth your courage and capacity to speak, we can conquer the world." I told Rajiv that since most Congress MPs were involved in some deal or the other, how can they dare oppose a Prime Minister? He heartily laughed in his innocent way. Ironically, Rajiv Gandhi was pushed into the Bofors deal  by Arun Nehru. Now as Minister in V.P.Singh's government, he was prosecuting Rajiv Gandhi. Such a hypocrisy or fraud I have rarely seen even in Indian politics. In late 1990, when I became Minister after toppling V.P.Singh's government, I discovered another fraud case in which V.P.Singh had played a double game : the St.Kitts case.

V.P.Singh Part II Subramanian Swamy

In 1989, when it appeared that V.P.Singh would head a new coalition and perhaps become the next Prime Minister, this appeared in some foreign news papers as a story that his son Ajaya Singh, settled abroad had a foreign account in the First National Bank in St Kitts islands, which is near the state of Florida in USA. The allegation was the huge amounts alleged to have been deposited, actually was illegal commissions collected by V.P.Singh when he was Commerce (and later Finance) Minister. Some documents in support of this allegation were also published. No one believed the story, which was also reproduced in Indian newspapers. In fact, the documents appeared on the face of it, forged and fake. Soon, the General Elections came, and the Congress Party was defeated at the polls. V.P.Singh became PM, and the first thing he did was to ask the CBI to register a case of forgery against Sri Chandraswami and some others, but not P.V.Narasimha Rao. His name was added later on Delhi High Court directions, in 1996, and then struck out at the trial stage recently. Mr.Rao as Foreign Minister had instructed the Consul General of India's office inNew York to attest and notarize the photostat of the documents as genuine copies. The trial court of Ajit Bharihoke had ordered the deletion of Mr.Rao's name because of Mr.Rao's defence that he did it on Mr.Rajiv Gandhi's directions. When I became Law Minister, the PM, Mr.Chandrasekhar asked me to handle Parliament questions on all ticklish and tough subjects like Bofors, St Kitts etc., .Therefore, the St.Kitts file came to me. After studying it, I called the CBI Director to my office to ask him two questions. The first question was: where were the original documents on which the Photostats or Xeroxes were made. The CBI Director told me that they were untraceable. Then only had the Consul General authenticated Photostats. So I asked the CBI how they hoped to win the case when they had only Photostats. No court in the democratic world would convict anyone on Photostats. Worse, the CBI had recorded in the file that even the Consul General had not seen the original! He simply had authenticated the Photostats on orders from Mr.Rao, who in turn did it on Rajiv Gandhi's orders. The second question I asked the CBI Director was: Did the CBI go to St Kitts and visit the First National Bank office to get affidavits of the Bank officer that no account of Mr.Ajeya Singh ever existed in that Bank. The Director of CBI told me that they could not, because the Bank had collapsed, and was sealed. No former officer of the Bank was ready to talk except a former general Manager who insisted that there was an account of Mr.Ajeya Singh. But the CBI did not accept this because, the Director said, Sri Chandraswami had through his associates, one 'Mamaji' bribed the former general manager to say this. Thus the CBI case against Sri Chandraswami and later Narasimha Rao was based on Photostats and without any verification from the Bank itself ,since it was closed. I asked the CBI Director: "How do you hope to win this case on such flimsy evidence?" The Director only smiled. They had been forced by V.P.Singh to file the case, and the CBI did not have the guts to refuse the Prime Minister. It was not my case that St. Kitts documents were not forgeries. On the face of it, the documents look like forgeries. But in a court of law, unless there is direct evidence, it can never be proved, The Bank had been closed down, and even the Prime Minister of St Kitt's refused to help. His argument was that his island country's main economy was tourism and secret bank accounts and hence he would not like the word to go around that St. Kitts banks are no longer strict about secrecy. Hence, there could never be any direct evidence in the St Kitts case. The St. Kitts case thus is a sterile and dead case. No one will ever be convicted by any fair minded judge on these CBI's evidence. The case was clearly instituted by V.P.Singh for some secret purpose. So I began searching for that secret purpose. The purpose could not be political harassment of Mr.Rajiv Gandhi since the CBI did not name him in the FIR. It could not be to take revenge against Sri Chandraswami whom he did not like for other reasons,  since V.P.Singh too would know that Chandraswami is not a soft person who can be demoralized by court cases. The purpose became clear to me after perusing the file on St.Kitts. When Rajiv Gandhi, as Prime Minister asked the CBI to investigate the newspaper reports of the St.Kitts accounts of Mr.Ajeya Singh son of V.P.Singh, the CBI had interrogated Mr.Ajeya Singh. In his September 1989 questioning, he had admitted to operating two secret Swiss Bank accounts. The CBI had then asked him to give them the bank transcripts of deposits and withdrawals with dates, into these accounts. From that, the CBI could study whether any transfers were made to an account in St.Kitts First National Bank. Mr.Ajeya Singh promised to provide these transcripts in one month's time. In one month's time however, Lok Sabha general elections were announced. Rajiv Gandhi lost majority in the elections and V.P.Singh became PM in December 1989.The CBI never want back to Mr.Ajeya Singh thereafter. So when I became Law Minister and read this in the file, I made a noting to the Prime Minister that the CBI should go back to Mr.Ajeya Singh and ask him for the transcripts. But Chandrasekhar just sat on the file. So did Narasimha Rao later, so did Deve Gowda, and  Gujral. Till I get a chance  this shall collect dust. V.P.Singh's purpose to file the St.Kitts forgery case thus became clear to me. He wanted to stall by diversion the CBI probe of his son's Swiss Bank accounts. Such is the truth ofIndia's Mr.Clean, V.P.Singh.