The paradox called Subramanian Swamy

The strong reaction to Janata Party (almost a single-man political outfit) president Subramanian Swamy’s article on July 16 in this paper from DNA readers is interesting and heartening.

It is interesting because it refutes the general presumption of the ‘politicised’ young of the 1960s and 1970s that the children of economic reforms are apolitical or deeply depolitcised. Young Aditya Ramakrishnan’s piece pooh-poohing with panache the Harvard economist’s Hindu-Zionist arguments is a clear example that young India is on its toes when it comes to political questions.

Many liberals have been outraged by Swamy’s arguments. The maverick — he hates the term and objects to being described as one — politician is no closet Hindu right-winger. He has been an outspoken reactionary right from his teaching days at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When the pseudo-socialists were ruling the roost in Delhi, he chose to rough it out alone. That is why he is a maverick. He was also, or appeared to be, a free-market economist. It was he who first spoke openly about getting close to Israel in the late 1970s, especially when the Janata Party was in power.

One would have assumed that one who believes in market economy is also an individualist and therefore some sort of a liberal.

Economic liberalisation presupposes political liberalism, where the individual’s effort and initiative makes a difference to the economy at large. Friedrich Hayek, who wrote the manifesto of a free market economy in his The Road To Serfdom in 1944, called himself a European liberal though the Americans labelled him a conservative.

Swamy fails the basic test of a market economist — fierce individualism. He harps on the ‘collective mind’ in his article. A ‘collective mind’ is good enough for a Soviet-era collective farm. But here is where his Zionism comes in. Remember, the Zionists remain fiercely liberal in their politics but they also believe in the ‘kibbutz’ culture, which is socialism in action in the community.

Zionists are not uncouth fascists, or even mad reactionaries, as Indian liberals would like to believe. Some of the Zionists are great individualists and great intellectuals. It was the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ that forced many liberal Jews to become contradictory Zionists.

This was a peculiar twist in the history of Europe which is haunting West Asia even today. But Zionism has outlived its purpose among European, and especially American, Jews a long time ago.

So, where does the Zionist way of Swamy’s thinking come from? It might be because Swamy is a Tamil Brahmin, and he feels that the social upsurge there which took the form of challenging and overthrowing the Brahmin domination in Tamil society from about the middle of the 19th century — no, it is not centuries old because the political elites in pre-colonial India were never Brahmins — and many Tamil Brahmins feel persecuted, intellectually and culturally at one level, and more acutely at the social and political levels. Many Tamil Brahmins are more receptive to the Hindutva thought than any other group in South India. Tamil Brahmins are in a continual intellectual sulk. Swamy personifies this.

He is not acceptable in the Bharatiya Janata Party, the natural party of Hindutva, because he cannot expand his intellectual horizon to include the complex Indian social mosaic. That is why he speaks so glibly of transcending caste barriers when caste identity is at the base of the social churning across the heartland of North India. Swamy shows that he has no clue about the Indian political reality.

All that Swamy can hope to get is to head the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is caught in a time warp much like the one Swamy is in.