Swamy's campaign vindicated

Mumbai: Mobbed by cameramen and with two fingers raised in a victory salute, Subramanian Swamy stood before Supreme Court yesterday, flushed with the vindication of an unrelenting legal campaign aimed at the country's most powerful politicians.

Swamy has waged a decades-long war against the ruling Congress party and the Nehru-Gandhi family at its heart.

Court verdict

India's top court ruled yesterday that telecoms licenses won during a scam-tainted bidding process that may have cost the government up to $36 billion (Dh132 billion) in lost revenues should be cancelled.

"This is a collective failure of the government of India," Swamy, who was a petitioner in the case, declared.

Swamy's fight is a political one. Amid the embarrassment for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government, which oversaw the sale of the licences at below-market prices, the 72-year-old eyed his next target.

"I will prove that Mr Chidambaram is a crook," he told a throng of reporters, cheered by the court's order that a lower court should investigate Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram.

Swamy accuses Chidambaram of signing off on the telecoms deal when he was finance minister. Chidambaram denies wrongdoing.

Swamy has been here before. Spurred by his arguments, in February 2011, the court ordered federal investigators to look into the 2G scam, named after the type of mobile licences involved, and in January accepted his petition that the role of the Prime Minister's Office in the process should be examined.

While self-styled Gandhian Anna Hazare staged hunger strikes that roused public opinion against the government last year, Swamy toiled in legal chambers, writing hundreds of letters and petitions, relentlessly shining a spotlight on an affair the government would rather forget.

A celebrated economist and noted foreign policy expert, Swamy is perhaps best known as a pedlar of conspiracy theories that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Political lineage

Swamy is president of the Janata Party, which was born of a political uprising against former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 1975-77 state of emergency and crushed her in elections to form the first post-independence government not led by Congress.