Out with the Old! In With the New Age of a Renewed India!!

By Jawahar Malhotra

STAFFORD:  Listening to Dr. Subramanium Swamy is like getting a history lesson from one who has researched the topics and even lived through some of backdrop and isn’t afraid to relate what he knows.

Like the response to a question at the tail end of his lecture he gave a week ago in Houston when he was asked what happened to the Indian Nationalist leader of Indian Independence, Subhas Chandra Bose. The official version is that his plane crashed in the Japanese-occupied island of Formosa and he died of third-degree burns. Swamy dismissed that theory and explained how declassified documents laid out the long trail that led to Bose being brought to Russia and being shot in a Gulag there.

Swamy, 76, is an Indian politician from the state of Tamil Nadu who is also an economist, author, professor and until 2013 was the President of the Janata Party when it merged with the Bharatiya Janata Party. He has been a member of the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, and held Minister portfolios of Law and recently of Justice and Commerce and Industry. He has considerable influence as an advisor in the current Government. Yet, he has also taught economics in summer sessions at Harvard University, as well as at the IIT-Delhi and is Chairman of the School of Communications and Management Studies in Kochi.

With his wide range of influence, education, teaching and political involvement, Swamy has been much sought out for speaking engagements wherever he goes, and he has already been through Houston in 2012 and 2013 to address audiences (see IAN dated August 16, 2012 and June 20, 2013). Last week, on Tuesday, August 26, Swamy was back in Houston at the invitation of the Arts of India Foundation at the VPSS auditorium off West Bellfort to address an audience of around 250 people after a buffet dinner.

This stop was part of his US tour which took him to Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Dallas and ended in the Hindu Unity Day in New York on August 30. AOIF Board members Pradip Parikh, Prasad Gujrala, Achalesh Amar and Dharminder Dargan were on hand, and Dargan even went on with Swamy for the speaking engagements in Austin and Dallas.

Swamy’s message to the Houston audience focused on the new government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he immediately cautioned people not to expect swift changes even with a majority party in power, after years of corrupt rule by the opposition Congress Party. Time and again in his speech, he returned to the theme of that he would make sure that the “mother and son” – referring to Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul – who ruled before would become state guests in Tihar Jail in Delhi.

He said the Modi government came to power due to his skill in governing Gujarat; the discrediting of the Congress government as the most corrupt since Independence and the ability to influence voters, especially Hindus, to overlook differences and vote as one block. He believed that India could once again become a developed country that would be the envy of the world and gave examples of how it had been a much admired place centuries ago.

Swamy stated that while many other civilizations in history have disappeared, the Hindus have survived, inspite of the rise of Islam and Christianity. He gave a brief history of the administration system under the British that is said to be the basis of the current Indian system and added that the tilt by the first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru towards the Soviet model held India back for decades. He praised the 3.5% to 8% GDP India has achieved over the recent past due to the revoking of all licenses, adding that India has a sound financial system that protected it from the recent global financial crisis.

In his worldview of the future, Swamy believes that India will overtake China shortly and become the second largest economy. All that was needed, he said, was a new “can-do” mindset. Indians, he believes, have all the traits to get there: the high value on philosophy, spiritual values, knowledge and sacrifice for future generations. Even the ancient language of Sanskrit will replace English in the future Swamy envisions, as witnessed by NASA making it a compulsory language. The future belonged to innovations and since India has the largest reserves of Thorium in the world, Swamy believes it will be the key to Indian energy independence and global leadership.

He ended, as he started, by insisting that he will make sure that all the Black money that is secreted away in foreign bank accounts  is repatriated to India, using both legal maneuvers and placing pressure on the institutions to disclose the names of account holders. He said that the people have to be patient for the good things to come, joking that these happen in the last year of the administration so that people remember what has been done. He concluded by saying that he would not rest till he saw Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and Chidabaran sent off to jail.