Is Subramanian Swamy India's Donald Trump?

Why he is trusted by very few, but ignored by even fewer

Robert Vadra should have known better before taking on Subramanian Swamy in a series of tweets on Saturday. Minutes after Vadra referred to him as “attention-seeking and deplorable", Swamy lashed back – “Mr Vadra should concentrate on staying out of jail”. Vadra’s only solace would be that Swamy has at least cared to respond to his tweets. After all, Vadra is a virtual nobody compared to some of Swamy’s other targets that include his famous in-laws as well as the country’s finance minister, the central bank governor and the chief economic advisor.

Swamy has reportedly been warned by his mentors in the Bharatiya Janata Party for exceeding his narrow job brief of embarrassing the Gandhis (Raghuram Rajan may have been added to that list later) in every possible way. That explains his softer (that itself is a big sacrifice for the firebrand MP) avatar at a media interaction. Explaining that he is a ‘straightforward’ person, Swamy said he doesn’t say things against A to target B — an oblique reference to suggestions that the man in his firing line is none other than Arun Jaitley.

 

Even more laughable was his defence that he did not use the word ‘bloodbath’ in a conventional sense of the term. This was in reference to his earlier comment that “if he indulges in indiscipline, there would be bloodbath”.

Only Swamy perhaps knows how to use ‘bloodbath’ in an unconventional way. And if this is the softer avatar of Swamy, god help his targets.

So is he the Trump of India? When a Bloomberg reporter asked him the question, Swamy’s response was an eye-opener. “Trump is the Swamy of America. I came much earlier than him,” the 76-year old MP, who revels in being a lightning rod of controversy, said. However, unlike some of his other statements, this one may not be too off the mark. For, both are media-savvy right-wing politicians who can go to any length to ridicule everyone from the ruling elite to religious minorities.

Sample these outrageous personal attacks by Trump. During a recent campaign, the Republican presidential candidate said an extremely credible source has told him that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud. After months of delivering shocking statements, Trump managed to land another jaw-dropper, proposing a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US.” There are many more, like his comments about his opponent Carly Fiorina’s looks.

Swamy has matched Trump word by word — from making fun of senior ministers who, according to him, look like “waiters when they wear coat and tie abroad” to calling the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan “mentally not fully Indian”.

Swamy is right when he said that he came much earlier than Trump. In a controversial article published in a Mumbai newspaper in July 2011, Swamy proposed depriving Muslims of voting rights unless they declared their families were converts from Hinduism — a statement that prompted Harvard University to drop two summer economics courses taught by Swamy from its curriculum in December that year.

Swamy has also shown an unparalleled knack of hurling abuses at even the tallest leaders of the party he now belongs to. In the 1990s, he called BJP a “party of semi-literates” and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee a “drunkard”. To be fair, his brilliance in using despicable adjectives has not been restricted to BJP alone — in March 1993, a few months after the Babri Masjid was demolished, he said Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was at “the core of this madness.” Sonia Gandhi, who he once described as Goddess Saraswati, is now nothing but a ‘smuggler,” and Priyanka Gandhi is an “alcoholic,” according to Swamy.

Swamy once said: “I know the rule, I know law, I know economics, I know Parliament. That’s an explosive combination”. What he forgot to mention is he knows choicest abuses, too. That's the reason perhaps why the man is trusted by few but ignored by even fewer. Example: his irreverent social media posts have brought him over 2.65 million Twitter followers.