The rather drastic fall of Subramanian Swamy

Subramanian Swamy is an accomplished political veteran. He has been actively involved in national politics since the Emergency. And in the most recent years, his activism in the Ram Setu and Ram Janambhoomi cases got applauded widely. In fact, when the BJP came to power in 2014, he was seen as a senior BJP leader.

Things go south between PM Modi and Swamy

However, things are now going south between PM Modi and Subramanian Swamy. PM Modi is, of course, the tallest leader in the country today. Subramanian Swamy is himself a political heavyweight but for his age, and other red flags, he has been denied a cabinet berth, which is perhaps due to a broad policy of the Modi government to keep age limits on its cabinet Ministers.

The BJP itself has many leaders, who have resigned or joined other parties because they were denied cabinet berths, which is completely alright because every leader has a right to harbour political ambitions.

Shatrughan Sinha and Arun Shourie were the first leaders to exit BJP, followed by Navjot Singh Sidhu. Recently, Babul Supriyo and Mukul Roy too left the BJP. PM Narendra Modi himself seems to understand when a leader wants to leave due to a lack of political power in the Modi government’s scheme of things.

Why Swamy’s case is different

However, Swamy’s case is different. He wasn’t denied everything by PM Modi. Swamy was given a Rajya Sabha berth in line with his political stature. For the first two years, Swamy performed reasonably well as a Rajya Sabha MP. He was instrumental in pushing the BJP’s political position.

The Nirmala factor

Yet, things seem to have deteriorated, once Nirmala Sitharaman was appointed as the Finance Minister in the Modi cabinet. Even when late Arun Jaitley was the Union Finance Minister, Swamy had criticised his policies. As per The Print, the Swamy-Jaitley rivalry dated back to the 1990s.

However, once Nirmala Sitharaman took over as the Union Finance Minister, Swamy became clearly critical of the Modi government.

• Swamy started by attacking PM Modi on political controversies like the naming of Ahmedabad cricket stadium.
• Over the past few months, Swamy has been making unpleasant allegations against the Modi government on the issue of the Sino-India military standoff.

• After PM Modi’s meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris, Swamy tweeted, “Did VP Kamala Harris tweet too about the meeting? I saw she had for a later meeting with African but as far as I saw she had not tweeted about the earlier Modi meeting.” The tweet was a reply to PM Modi’s tweet after his meeting with Harris, which makes it much more unsavoury. It was pointed out by many social media users that Kamala Harris indeed tweet about it but Swamy kept silent thereafter.

• In the latest tweet, Swamy claimed, “I may be not in sync with Modi Govt on economic policy but Modi govt is out of sync with party workers and people.” He also tweeted an HT report about RSS’s discontent over the Modi government’s monetization policy.

Those who ultimately end their relationship with PM Modi or the BJP as a whole go through a template- they start off as Modi supporters, then they claim to be sidelined leaders, then they say claim a disconnect between Modi and the party, then they became BJP haters and finally they get averse to the right-wing Dharmic ideology altogether.

Presently, Swamy seems to be bordering on hate for PM Modi. He is seemingly on the path to an unfortunate fallout with the BJP. It is, however, disheartening to see a widely admired political leader go through such friction with the Modi government.