Author: Subramanian Swamy, New
Delhi
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: January 4, 2005
Sir, Mr Amulya Ganguli who as a
journalist has switched jobs more often than anyone can remember, has hopefully,
finally found a resting place in the outhouses of 10 Janpath. His crude
attack (Jokers in the Parivar, The Editorial Page, January 3) on the newly
formed Rashtriya Swabhiman Manch and an even more vulgar diatribe against
George Fernandes should assure him of a place there. His swipe, in passing,
at me will be replied to in this letter hopefully in a language that he
is habituated to understand.
Mr Ganguli has, to begin with, got
many of his facts wrong. I shall illustrate with two. RSM was not founded
by Govindacharya as he writes, but by a few of us, which did not include
Govind, on JP's birthday, October 11 last year. Mr Ganguli also states
that BJP boycotted the function. BJP as a party, for that matter, no party
was invited; only individuals were. Uma Bharti was invited but she sent
a letter expressing support and regretted that due to high fever she could
not make it. Other prominent BJP leaders were in the audience. More important,
Mr Ganguli failed to understand the significance of the RSS and VHP chiefs
addressing the rally.
Mr Ganguli's main complaint is that
we are all timeservers. That is better than being Sonia's servants or Uncle
Toms. We are at this time serving the democratic need for an Opposition,
and not basking with handouts from those in power. Moreover, the need of
the time is to learn from history. That lesson is: faced with a perceived
danger to national security, Indian kings chose to settle their mutual
differences by siding with outsiders who had entered the Indian public
domain by the backdoor and through convenient assassinations, and thereby
handed the country and its vast treasures to these outsiders. We must learn
never to do that again. But history could repeat itself since the same
paradigm of power structure is visible today. In today's India, the danger
arises from the person of Ms Sonia Gandhi. We do not know who she really
is, and much of what we are told by her about herself contradicts known
facts. Her birth certificate sent by the Italian embassy to the home ministry
in 1983 when she had applied for Indian citizenship states that her name
is Antonia, not Sonia, and that her place of birth is not Orbassano (as
stated in Lok Sabha's Who's Who) but in Luciana. She was born in 1944 but
her father Stefano Maino, according one report, was from 1942 till Italy
surrendered to the Allies, a prisoner of war in a Russian cell (as a loyal
soldier of the defeated Hitler's Nazi Fascist army; Ganguli who foams in
the mouth about fascism of the RSS, says nothing about that). Why this
camouflage about her name, date and place of birth in her published bio-data?
Ms Sonia Gandhi has never passed high school. Yet, on a sworn affidavit
before a magistrate while filling her Lok Sabha candidacy form in 2004,
she falsely affirmed that she has a certificate in English from the University
of Cambridge. The university has emphatically denied that she was ever
a student even for a day. This false declaration is a criminal offence
under the IPC.
She had written the same lie in
the 1999-2004 Lok Sabha Who's Who, but when the Speaker confronted her
with my complaint, she demurred that it was "typing mistake" (it would
then qualify for the Guinness Book as the longest typing mistake in history).
If she was not studying in UK, how
was she supporting herself in London from 1963 to 1968? Who did she work
for? And what was the nature of her employment? Why is there so much reluctance
on her part to reveal that information? Is it embarrassing for her to tell
the truth? The nation however has a right to know.
Mr Ganguli glorifies Ms Sonia Gandhi
as a sacrificing angel for giving up her opportunity to be PM in 2004.
He claims that RSM is in grief because we lost our raison d'être.
Is her claimed sacrifice verifiable? We know that Ms Gandhi had written
to the President staking a claim to be sworn in as PM, and had obtained
an appointment (fixed for 5 p.m. on May 17) to meet him to be invited to
form the government. She even had submitted a list of 340 signatures of
MPs on their respective letter-heads proposing her name. One of those letters
was signed by Sonia Gandhi as an MP proposing herself! She also demanded
that 3,000 persons be invited to witness the oath-taking ceremony and that
it be held on the lawns of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Such was the atmosphere
till 3.30 p.m. on May 17. Is this the behaviour of a sacrificing angel?
What made her change her mind? Was it the letter that the President sent
to her at 3.30 p.m. asking her to cancel her 5 p.m. appointment and come
the next day to discuss government formation in general terms? This letter
was never released to her party, or allies or the press. If made public,
we shall know the real reason for the change of heart. The blunt truth
is that Ms Sonia Gandhi cannot legally become a PM because of a reciprocity
proviso in the Citizenship Act. When I met the President at 12.45 p.m.
on May 17, I had given him details of this proviso.
How does Mr Ganguli explain that
Ms Gandhi has gone and made an alliance with those parties who praise the
killers of Rajiv Gandhi? Why did she have to write to the President to
commute the hanging sentence handed down by the Supreme Court to four LTTE
conspirators in the murder of her husband but refused to recommend Dhananjoy
Chatterjee's case?
Today her disdain for Dr Manmohan
Singh hurts the Indian sentiment if not Dr Singh's. Maybe Mr Ganguli can
persuade Ms Sonia Gandhi that discretion is better than arrogant disdain
for the Indian. The Indian worm can turn as we saw in 1977. It was the
Fernandes-Swamy duo then who had provided the necessary activism and example
of courage to make JP's call effective and enable thelikes of Ganguli to
write freely.