Subramanian Swamy

Subramanian Swamy
President, Janata Party
Incumbent
Assumed office 1990
Union Cabinet Minister for Commerce, Law and Justice
In office 1990–1991
Prime Minister	Narasimha Rao
Member of the Rajya Sabha
Member of the Lok Sabha
Personal details
Born	(1939-09-15) 15 September 1939 Mylapore, Chennai, India
Political party	Janata Party
Spouse	Dr. Roxna Swamy
Alma mater	Indian Statistical Institute Harvard University
Profession	Economist Professor Author Politician

Dr. Subramanian Swamy (born 15 September 1939 in Chennai, sometimes spelt Subramaniam Swamy) is presently the President of Janata Party. He is a politician and also a trained economist.

Early Life

Subramanian Swamy studied his masters degree in statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute. He then went to study at Harvard University on a full scholarship. He did his doctoral research with two Nobel Laureates namely Simon Kuznets and Paul A Samuelson. Dr. Swamy has also jointly authored with Professor Samuelson a path breaking study on Index Number Theory. He was awarded a doctorate in Economics by Harvard University (Class of 1965).

For sometime, while completing his dissertation in 1963, he worked at the United Nations Secretariat in New York as an Assistant Economics Affairs Officer. He subsequently worked as a resident tutor at Lowell House at Harvard.

Professorships

In 1964, Swamy joined the faculty of economics at Harvard and from then on he has till date taught at the Department of Economics for a total period of 12 years. He was an assistant professor at the Harvard Economics department where he later became an Associate professor in 1969. Though he now does not teach full time at Harvard; he however has been regularly teaching for a long time and also currently teaches economics courses in summer session at Harvard in the position of a full rank Professor.

From 1969 to 1991, he was a Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He was removed from the position by its board of Governors in the early 1970s but was legally reinstated in the late 1980s by the Supreme Court of India. He continued in the position till 1991 when he resigned to become a cabinet minister. He served on the Board of Governors of the IIT, Delhi (1977–80), and on the Council of IITs (1980–82).

He is the chairman of School of Communication & Management Studies in Kerala, a premier business institute in India.

Comparative study

He is accounted by some to be an authority on the comparative study of India and China and is also well-versed in the Mandarin Chinese (Hanyu) language.

Political career

Role played during Indian Emergency:

He first came into the spotlight for protesting against the emergency imposed in 1975 by Mrs Indira Gandhi. He went underground for a period of 6 months to avoid being arrested by police. Under the instruction of Jayaprakash Narayan, Swami escaped to US, so that he could mobilise overseas Indians and world media against the emergency.

Later in August 1976, in order to protest against emergency, he decided to make a "point of order" speech in Indian Parliament. As there was a pending arrest warrant against him, he came to India in a hopping flight to Bangkok that had a stop over in New Delhi. As he was a transit passenger, his name would not appear in the list of passengers. On 10 August 1976, Swami made his way into parliament dramatically. The speaker was reading out a obituary and Swami asked the speaker to include democracy in the obituary list. He then made his way out of the parliament and escaped to Nepal. Nepal king Birendra, who was Swami's student in Harvard put him on a flight to Bangkok and then to US.

Elections contested:

He was one of the founding members of the Janata Party and was its president since 1990. He was elected Member of Parliament 5 times between 1974 and 1999. He has twice represented the city of Mumbai North East during 1977 and 1980, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the Parliament. He is regarded as a proponent of Hindutva.

He was also a member of the Planning Commission between 1990 and 1991. Between 1994 and 1996, he held the position of Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade (equivalent to the rank of a cabinet minister) under the P. V. Narasimha Rao government. Dr. Swamy has been subject to several defamation cases. He is known to argue these cases himself without the agency of lawyers. In October 2004, he along with other members of the erstwhile Janata Party established the Rashtriya Swabhiman Manch to oppose the policies of the ruling UPA.

Issues Held:

China and India

He is known for his efforts in normalizing relations with China and Israel. In 1981, he persuaded Deng Xiaoping to open the Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet to the Hindu pilgrims from India. He became the first Indian on the reopening to visit Kailash and Mansarovar in 1981. In 1990-1991, he was a minister in the Chandra Shekhar cabinet and was in charge of the ministries of Commerce and Law and Justice.

2G spectrum scam

On 27 November 2010 Subramanian Swamy anounced that he will file a criminal case against former union minister A. Raja in the 2G Spectrum Scam before the Special Court for Corruption Cases in connection with the charges of irregularities in 2G spectrum allocation. He later said that under Section 319 of the Criminal Procedure Code, he would name the other “beneficiaries” in the scam. Until today, this scam has resulted to be the most historic and the biggest in the history of India.

The 2G spectrum scam involved officials in the government of India illegally undercharging mobile telephony companies for frequency allocation licenses, which they would use to create 2G subscriptions for cell phones. According to a report submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General based on money collected from 2G licenses, the loss to the exchequer was ₹176,379 crore (US$21 billion). The Supreme Court of India took Subramaniam Swamy's complaints on record [With Case type:Writ Petition (Civil),Case No:10, Year:2011] . The Comptroller and Auditor-General's report had put the presumptive loss to the government at Rs.1.75 lakh crore, but according to Dr. Swamy, the gratification shared would be only about Rs.60,000 crore.

Subramanian Swamy adviced the Government of India that it should re-auction 2G spectrum after the Supreme Court issued notice to the union government and 11 firms in the alleged scam in the allocation of airwaves.

Kapil Sibal has disputed that the Comptroller and Auditor General's presumptive loss estimate in the allocation of 2G spectrum. He said Friday the methodology used was "utterly erroneous" in pegging Rs 1.76 lakh crore (US$40 billion) as the notional loss while awarding airwaves for 2G phone services in 2008.

Personal life

Subramanian Swamy has two daughters, Gitanjali Swamy and Suhasini Haider. Suhasini Haider is a journalist with the Indian television channel CNN-IBN. He is married to Dr. Roxna Swamy who is an advocate in the Supreme Court in India.

Books

Dr. Subramanian Swamy is the author of numerous books and writes regularly in various journals and newspapers. Some of his books are :-

• Economic Growth in China and India (1989)
• The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: unanswered questions and unasked queries (2000)
• Hindus Under Siege (2006)
• Corruption and Corporate Goverance in India: Satyam, Spectrum, and Sundaram (2009)
• Economic Development and Reforms in India and China (2010)

References

• Boumans, Marcel (2005). How Economists Model the World Into Numbers. Routledge. ISBN 0415346215.

External links

• Biography on Janta Party site
• Kashmir Hindu Foundation interviews Subramaniam Swamy
• Subramaniam Swamy's views on the influence of Hinduism
• Subramaniam Swamy in Janata Party's website
• An article by Dr. Subramanian Swamy on how to face defamation litigation
• Basic Islam for Hindu Dhimmis - Subramanian Swamy
• The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi: unanswered questions and unasked queries