When the Scud of Sholavandan met its Patriot

@swamy39, the ballistic Twitter handle known for its witty and vicious repartees, has gone benign and nostalgic

Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy is not known to pull his punches. Nor does he mince words. No office seemed too high for his criticism. No public personality was insulated from his barbs.  Fuelled by his 2.82 million Twitter followers, whom he fondly calls PTs (Patriotic Tweeple), the Scud of Sholavandan ( his ancestral village near Madurai) was firing on all cylinders after tasting success with R3, his code name for RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. 

While Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s clothes came into the line of fire, lesser mortals like bureaucrats and advisers were getting painted in ‘anti-national’ and ‘scamster’ colours . The worst was reserved for Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, who was asked to focus on staying out of jail.  Swamy’s fans and followers wanted one to think that his attacks had sanction from the highest level of office in the country.   

The Scud finally met its Patriot in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself at dusk on Monday.  Though the anchor did not name Swamy, he did not leave much to the imagination when he zeroed it down to comments by ”a Rajya Sabha MP”.  Modi started by calling the comments ‘inappropriate’ and heaped praises on ‘patriotic’ Rajan. That would have been difficult enough for the Swamy army to swallow. But, he went on to add that people engaged in these “publicity stunts” are doing no good to the country.

Ouch. Now, that really hurt. It must have been really painful for millions of internet bhakts, who have sought refuge in patriotism and the emerging profession of social media-based ‘saving the country’. 

@Swamy39, the much followed ballistic twitter handle which has over 47.4k tweets, went quiet. The usual witty and vicious repartees never came. Instead he chose to tweet about a paper on index numbers he co-authored with economist Paul Samuelson, which apparently was used by the European Union in its monetary policy.  On Tuesday, @Swamy39 struck a philosophical note, tweeting: 

The 25 yet-to-be-named people on his ‘hit list’ of bureaucrats, whom he threatened to 'kalaas' ,  might be heaving a sigh of temporary relief at the small change in equilibrium effected by a frankly speaking Modi.

A retweet even took a pledge: 

 

Swamy’s beloved PTs seemed to have finally discovered Swamy’s Lakshman Rekha.  Publisher and Swamy supporter Minhaz Merchant ‏@minhazmerchant  tweeted

 
Merchant also played down the Modi interview as “good in parts” and mildly “Lutyenised”.

New theories of how Swamy has the backing of Nagpur – where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fount of the BJP – started floating around.

Publicity stunts are not new to Swamy. Almost two decades ago, while contesting for the Madurai Lok Sabha constituency for his Janata Party, he had made ‘incredible’ promises.

I remember reading in local papers that he promised to bring the sea, which was some 100 kilometres away and a modern port to the land-locked city. He also promised to bring South Korean carmaker Hyundai’s  factory, which was then in planning stage, to the city. These could have created much needed employment in the area, which even today lives off its past glory.

Even the tsunami that came later couldn’t bring the sea to Madurai and the Hyundai factory went to Sriperumbudur, near Chennai.  To be fair to Swamy, his tenure as Madurai MP was short-lived. But one could argue even that was his own doing. 

Less than a year into his term, in March 1999, Swamy famously arranged a tea party where the so-called secular forces including Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa met to derail the 13-month old Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. 

On Tuesday, Swamy seemed to be remembering those good old days, when he retweeted a fan tweet of a The Telegraph article titled: “Swamy and Gandhis: Not always foes.”