Illustration : Ashoke Mullick

The bearded man in a turban peers out of a framed photograph, one of the many black-and-white pictures hanging on the walls of Subramanian Swamy’s office.

“Do you recognise him,” the Janata Party president asks. I don’t, but he insists I take another look. “Some Sikh friend of yours,” I venture.

Swamy chortles with glee. “Don’t worry. Even Indira Gandhi’s police could not recognise me in that make-up,” says the 71-year-old, clean-shaven Tamilian.

That was during the Emergency imposed by Gandhi in 1975. Opposition leaders were being arrested and a warrant was out for him. Swamy — the enfant terrible of Indian politics — went around Delhi disguised as a Sikh, until he was “caught” by a Sikh autorickshaw driver who, having taken him for a fellow Sikh, had asked for directions to his house in Punjabi.

“I tried to say I was a Sikh from Canada. But that got me into deeper trouble. The driver said he wanted to migrate to Canada and asked me to help him get a visa,” Swamy recalls.

The first thing Swamy did when he got to his apartment was to remove his make-up and pledge never to wear it again. “I exposed myself,” he says, smiling.

Almost 35 years later, Subramanian Swamy is busy exposing former telecom minister A. Raja, the man allegedly behind the 2G spectrum scam rocking the nation.

As he prepares to seek an arrest warrant for Raja on charges of corruption in the Supreme Court, I meet the maverick politician at his office in his Nizamuddin East residence in Delhi. Of course, being a politician is just one of the several caps that Swamy wears. He is an economist, a visiting professor at Harvard, a China specialist and a writer of academic tomes.

Indeed, it is hard to say what Subramanian Swamy is — an anti-corruption crusader, as his supporters say, or a publicity hound who likes to fish in troubled waters, as his detractors counter. Some believe his allegations are too outlandish; others disagree.

What’s clear, though, is that Swamy thrives on controversies. The man once known as “Bomb Swamy” because he urged India to go nuclear well before the 1974 Pokhran blast is now seeking to tighten the net around Raja.

On this chilly morning, he is wearing white pyjamas and a kurta with a dark worsted vest over it. He waves me in with a friendly, “Yes, sir.”

I take a chair. A golden retriever comes in and parks itself at my feet.

Swamy has been up — as is his custom — since 4am. In the last six hours, he has checked his email and pored over the law books that he says he needs to read to fight the ongoing corruption case. This is the latest in a string of some 70 cases that he has filed over the years in his bid to “expose corruption and fight injustices,” he says.

He always argues his cases himself. The only person he takes legal advice from is his wife Roxna, a Supreme Court lawyer. “We discuss the cases I fight and sometime she corrects me but I never get her involved in my cases.”

Swamy wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November 2008, seeking “sanction” to prosecute Raja, who was then a minister. The Supreme Court recently slammed the government for its “silence” on Swamy’s letters, forcing the Prime Minister’s office (PMO) to file an affidavit to explain its “inaction”.

But Swamy is not entirely pleased with the way the media have portrayed his fight with the PMO. “The media wanted me to go after Manmohan Singh. But why should I,” he asks.

For one, Swamy says he now finds — from the government affidavit — that Singh had not “sat on” his requests for sanction and had, in fact, asked his officers to “take action”.

And second, Swamy says any attempts on his part to weaken the Prime Minister would only help those in the Congress who would like him replaced with a “poodle”.

“The Prime Minister may be a weak person but he is not easy (to manipulate) and he drags his feet when asked to do something he doesn’t want to. Why should I create a vacancy by going after Manmohan Singh,” he asks.

Swamy may have private reasons for sparing Singh as well. There is a hint of gratitude in his voice as he narrates how Singh helped him land his first job at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Swamy, the son of a civil servant, had just returned to India in 1969 from Harvard, where he had been teaching economics after finishing his PhD in a record one-and-a-half years, with the promise of a job from the Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

He was carrying a letter from the then department head, Amartya Sen, which said a gaddi had been created for him. “But left-wing economists, alarmed by my anti-communist views, had conspired to keep me out of DSE. It was a huge disappointment as I had given up everything to return to India,” Swamy says.

Singh, who was then chairman of IIT Delhi’s (economics) selection committee, came to his aid. At 29, Swamy — born in Chennai and educated in Delhi, Calcutta and the US — became a “full” professor of economics at IIT Delhi, only to lose the job a year later.

“The IIT Delhi board of governors met one day in 1970 and gave me a letter saying my service was no more required. They gave no reason,” Swamy says. When he asked for a reason, he was told to move court.

He did. Nineteen years later, he was reinstated. He took over as a professor again and resigned within an hour. “I’d had enough,” he says. He is now “negotiating” with the institution for his dues of some Rs 24 lakh.

The former Union law and commerce minister and five-time MP between 1974 and 1999 can never “forget” what Singh has done for him. “Through all these years, I have kept in touch with him,” he says.

Nor can he forget Rajiv Gandhi, who, he says, was like a brother to him. His association with the former Prime Minister started when Swamy says he objected to some Janata Party leaders trying to implicate Rajiv in an Indian Airlines deal when the Morarji Desai government was in power.

“Rajiv was not in politics then and I did not like the idea of getting a non-political person involved in a murky deal,” he says.

Word got to Rajiv and he wanted to meet Swamy to “express his gratitude”. The next time they met was when Swamy was returning to Delhi from Bhopal on an Indian Airlines flight that Rajiv was flying as a pilot.

The relationship grew when Rajiv got elected to Parliament in 1982 and sat across Swamy in the house. “He started asking me all sorts of questions because he knew nothing about politics,” Swamy says.

He almost got Rajiv into trouble once by persuading him to raise in Parliament the demand for withdrawal of Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir, which gives the state a special status and is staunchly opposed by sections of the Opposition. “But he did not raise it in Parliament the next day. Rajiv told me he had discussed it with his mummy (Indira Gandhi) and she told him not to get trapped in this,” Swamy says, his eyes gleaming with mischief.

Swamy points out he “backed” Rajiv when the Bofors scandal broke out and would have joined the Congress — Rajiv, he says, wanted him to — if the Congress had won a majority in the 1989 general elections. “He was a true nationalist and his death at the hands of the LTTE was a great loss to the nation,” Swamy says, one of the few politicians from Tamil Nadu to call the LTTE a terrorist organisation publicly, earning him Z-plus security.

If Rajiv was a friend, his wife Sonia certainly isn’t one. Swamy was among the first to question Sonia’s Italian roots and her decision to join politics after her husband’s death and continues to take potshots at her.

Swamy recalls that their first meeting was when Rajiv invited him to dinner at his residence. It ended with Sonia “walking away” in a huff after an exchange of words. The tense relationship has soured over the years to the point where Swamy now calls it a “full-scale war”.

Right now, though, the battle is centred on the DMK. Besides trying to book Raja, he wants to dislodge M. Karunanidhi’s party from power in Tamil Nadu in the 2011 assembly elections. And to achieve that, he wouldn’t mind joining hands with AIDMK’s Jayalalithaa.

“Yes, I fought her and she went to jail. But personally, I have a high regard for her,” he says, explaining his stance that his detractors slam as political opportunism.

The president of an outfit that critics laugh off as a one-man party, he spends his days reading, writing and fighting cases. And he often remembers his days in Calcutta, where his father was posted in the early Sixties and where he did his masters at the Indian Statistical Institute. “I still remember the way men cleared the way for women in crowded buses and the way people treated rash drivers,” he says.

Now he looks at the Casio on his wrist and gets up. He is gone as quickly as he came in.