Swamy and Gandhis: Not always foes

NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi may now be among BJP Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy's favourite targets, but a quarter century ago the Gandhis counted the Harvard-educated economist as an ally if not a friend. Swamy had as Union minister helped secure Veer Bhoomi as the site for Rajiv Gandhi's cremation and memorial in May 1991 despite the then Prime Minister, Chandra Shekhar, having reservations about handing the plot over. Sonia, still in shock over Rajiv's May 21 assassination, had threatened a news conference to reveal how the government was refusing her a plot near Raj Ghat.

Swamy, then law and commerce minister, played peacemaker. He accompanied Priyanka Gandhi and Amitabh Bachchan - then a close friend of the Gandhis -to the Rajghat area to pick a site. As Chandra Shekhar sulked, Swamy worked closely with the then urban development secretary, Madhav Godbole, and some other government agencies to free up the plot. They demolished over 1,000 shanties overnight, displacing around 8,000 impoverished men, women and children. Swamy then had two ash ponds, a power station, a workshop and sheds of the Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking removed to secure an additional 30 acres, in the process threatening Delhi's power supply. Godbole has in his memoirs, Unfinished Innings: Recollections and Reflections of a Civil Servant, written that Sonia, Priyanka and Bachchan had rejected the government's suggestion for a piece of land from Shakti Sthal, where Indira Gandhi's memorial stands. Apparently, the Gandhis wanted a part of Vijay Ghat, which hosts former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's samadhi. Chandra Shekhar vetoed this since an earlier handover of a part of Vijay Ghat to the CRPF had triggered an uproar in Parliament. Godbole recalls Chandra Shekhar telling him: "How can we justify withdrawing land from Vijay Ghat when the (Gandhi) family already has so much of land under various memorials?" Plots along a 3km stretch on the Yamuna's banks already hosted memorials to Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and son Sanjay. As the stalemate continued, foreign dignitaries such as then US Vice-President Dan Quayle, Yasser Arafat and Prince Charles had begun arriving in New Delhi for Rajiv's funeral. Chandra Shekhar asked Swamy to use his influence with the Gandhis. When the matter was resolved, Swamy took Chandra Shekhar to the site on May 23, 1991, the day before the cremation. According to Godbole, an impressed Prime Minister told Swamy: "I hope you will give such land to my memorial and that of other Prime Ministers too." Shortly afterwards, Swamy publicly claimed that after the fall of V.P. Singh's National Front government in end-1990, Rajiv had asked him to become Prime Minister but he had generously passed the gift on to Chandra Shekhar. There was no denial from 10 Janpath. As a Jana Sangh MP during the Emergency, Swamy had embarrassed then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by suddenly appearing in Parliament when most of his party colleagues were in jail, and then outwitting the police to escape from the House and India. He drew close to Rajiv as a Janata Party MP in the late 1980s, helping script the replacement of the V.P. Singh government, of which his party was a part. In March 1999, Swamy organised a tea party at a Delhi hotel that Sonia, Jayalalithaa and Mayawati attended to explore the possibility of an alternative government to replace that of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom Swamy disliked. In April, Jayalalithaa walked out of the Vajpayee ministry, which then lost a trust vote. But eventually, a replacement couldn't be propped up, and Vajpayee returned to power in the post-Kargil September elections. An angry Jayalalithaa dumped Swamy. Shortly afterwards, Congress leader Arjun Singh is said to have shown Sonia some documents on Swamy that prompted her to distance herself from him. Swamy, who had just written a book on Rajiv's assassination and presented a copy to Sonia, is even now sore with the late Arjun for "poisoning" Sonia's mind against him.