'Is it right and proper for the US authorities to allow people like Subrahmanya Swamy go round the country preaching murder, violence, overthrow of the duly elected Government of India?'
A fascinating excerpt from Sugata Srinivasaraju's The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship.
By escaping to the US as an Opposition MP and maverick academic, Subramanian Swamy had already made headlines in India.
In February 1976, T N Kaul had written a confidential letter to Indira Gandhi in which Swamy figured prominently. The Jan Sangh MP, who was 'floating around in UK until recently, has popped up here now and is going round various towns where there are Indians and Indian students, holding meetings and doing some vicious, false and malicious propaganda,' Kaul wrote.
He also informed the prime minister that he had asked a senior member of the Supreme Court Bar, Balraj Trikha, to be present at one of the meetings at Maryland University and challenge Swamy.
'I do not know Shri Trikha's background but if you feel we should make more use of him, we should do so. He is little bumptious and aggressive, but perhaps that is the kind of thing that is needed to deal with people like Subrahmanya Swamy [sic] and the so called "Indians for Democracy",' he advised Indira Gandhi.
Kaul added that he intended to speak to the State Department about the activities of people like Swamy and suggested that the matter should be taken up with the US embassy in New Delhi too.
'Is it right and proper for the US authorities to allow people like Subrahmanya Swamy [sic] go round the country preaching murder, violence, overthrow of the duly elected Government of India? You may like to have this matter examined and instructions sent to me,' he wrote.
Around the time that Kaul wrote the letter to Indira Gandhi, a provocative interview of Swamy was published in India Abroad. Kaul had attached a copy of it to his letter to Indira Gandhi. Swamy, in the interview, had said that the number of people who had been arrested under the government's emergency powers had touched 140,000, and that the figure was based on the statements of various chief ministers.
Swamy, who had arrived in the US on January 26, claimed that he had come on the invitation of various Indian groups. 'We respect Indians abroad. We know they have a conscience,' he had said.
When asked about the Indian 'underground' and if it really existed, he said that people would have taken the underground seriously if it had engaged in violence, but violence was not the answer.
Identifying himself as a member of that non violent underground, he said, 'We take ourselves seriously because tomorrow we may be ruling the country. We are not noticed because we have not converted India into another Lebanon. But that's not important. Our aim is to be peaceful.'
He also said that there was a time when the RSS had called JP a 'Pakistani agent' because he had espoused Sheikh Abdullah's case but, 'Now we are working with the same man. Remember Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill got together to remove Hitler.'
In the interview, Swamy offered the example of his own dismissal from the IIT, New Delhi.
He said, 'Towards the end of 1972, I was dismissed summarily. There was no explanation, but the object was to tighten the screws on me. I am still fighting the dismissal. And it was the same tactics used against JP. They called for audit and investigation of the Gandhi [Peace] Foundation where he worked, just to make life difficult.'
Immediately after the Emergency was declared, Swamy had gone underground in India. For the first few years of the Emergency, he had moved around with Nanaji Deshmukh, the RSS stalwart, acting as his driver.
If Swamy had disguised himself as a Sikh sardar with a turban, Deshmukh, the dhoti-clad elder, had become a bespectacled businessman in a grey safari suit with his grey hair dyed black.
It was the RSS network that Swamy had worked in to escape arrest. After Nanaji was discovered in a raid and sent to jail, Swamy decided to shift to London via Colombo in Sri Lanka.
In London, B K Nehru was India's high commissioner, whom Swamy knew from his Harvard days. Nehru had also been India's ambassador in Washington. When Swamy phoned him, in a 'courageous' and 'gentlemanly' way, Nehru insisted on 'inviting the proscribed Swamy to tea.'
After having spent a few days in London, Swamy had arrived in the US, in January 1976, on India's Republic Day.
In an article Swamy wrote in the Indian Opinion, at the beginning of his lecture tour, he had said that it was completely false to suggest that only a handful of Western-educated elite were complaining about the Emergency.
Putting forth economic numbers and contrasting ground reports, he had made a lucid argument that it was the rich who were happy, and prominent intellectuals, 'as they have always done', were by and large sitting on the fence, while the lower middle classes and the poor were miserable.
Contrary to claims, he said that the economy had worsened since the Emergency, if one considered basic indicators such as retail prices of essential commodities, unemployment and new investment.
To the popular propaganda line that if many were actually against the Emergency there would have been a popular uprising in a few months, Swamy argued, 'The answer is that a lot has happened, but not enough of course. The situation is still developing.'
'We Indians don't react that fast. In 1942, the British jailed Mahatma Gandhi and 40,000 others at the height of the Quit India movement. There was not much reaction for three years and then the British had to go. Mrs Gandhi is in a much worse position than the British.'
Since Swamy was an MP and risked losing his membership if he remained absent for a prescribed period, he returned to India and made a dramatic appearance in the Rajya Sabha when Vice President of India and Chairman of the House B D Jatti was reading out obituary references.
He marked his attendance by raising a point of order -- he claimed that Jatti had left out democracy from his list of the deceased. He shouted that out and before he could be apprehended, he escaped.
'For three months, Swamy was kept hidden by [an] RSS faithful in Bombay and Pune.' Again, the RSS network ensured he got out of India, this time, via Nepal. He knew King Birendra, who was a student at Harvard when Swamy was teaching, and the king had him picked up as soon as he had crossed the Indian border into Nepal and flown down to Kathmandu.
After a brief stay there, he went back to London via Bangkok and Rome. He was back in the US, again, by December 1976, by which time he had been expelled from the Rajya Sabha, in mid-November 1976.
During the expulsion debate in Rajya Sabha, Swamy was accused of leading 'an anti-India campaign inside the country in the company of those people who wanted to destabilise the system of democracy in India.'
On Swamy's constant appearance in the Western press, it was said that they 'propagate the theory of Dr Kissinger' and the entire media was friends of the 'so called Friends of India Society' floated by Swamy. Swamy was also referred to as a 'revolutionary' and a 'coward' at the same time.
He was referred to as 'a brilliant man [who had] fallen in[to] wrong hands, fallen in[to] bad company.' To retain him as part of the Rajya Sabha was to cast an 'aspersion on parliamentary democracy itself'.
Excerpted from The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship by Sugata Srinivasaraju, with the kind permission of the publishers Penguin Random House India.
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