Swamy and Foes. Why India Inc.'s biggest companies hate his guts - Fortune (India, Dec. 2013)

Right after he told me not to forget that he was a life-long free market crusader, Subramanian Swamy helped me count the number of cases he is fighting against various Indian companies. There that insinuation of his that the sale of the Indian telecom provider Aircel to Malaysia’s Maxis brought illegitimate benefits to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and his son Karti — this also has an allied case accusing the Chidambarams of money-laundering via a company called Advantage.

There are other cases of course (like the one accusing the Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, the mother and son duo who run the ruling Congress Party of financial impropriety in the purchase of assets an old newspaper) but they have always been in Swamy’s 40-year-career as an outlier politician in India. Newspapers have always described him as ‘maverick’.

But in the last few years, Swamy has become more than just that, more than a politician who is mildly irritating to the mainstream for his unique combination of impeccable honesty and iconoclastic views. Since his activism in the 2G telecom spectrum scandal in 2010 which sent then telecom minister Andimuthu Raja to prison, he has become the man India Inc fears — and will largely not talk about. Every corporate Fortune Indiareached out to comment on Swamy, declined. And for good reason — his 2G petition caused a license cancellation worth Rs. 9,000 crores. Now at stake a $900 million investment of Etihad in debt and equity into Jet, $30 million (Rs. 162 crores) investment in the Air Asia deal and $100 million to be put in for the Tata-Singapore Airlines carrier.

Think about it like this — the amount of money at risk from Swamy’s litigations at the moment is more than what the Indian government committed to spend in 2009 for a countrywide solar power programme over 13 years till 2022 (i.e. $900 million).

“I don’t care about what money they lose,” says Swamy, who often threatened to send Anil Ambani and Ratan Tata to prison during the 2G scandal (both Tata Tele and Reliance ADAG had bought licenses).

“The truth is more important to me.”

This for a man who has advocated the abolishing of personal tax and corporate tax all his life is curious happenstance. “India has always had a very high propensity to save and Indian corporate want to invest in India, so if we abolish both, the amount of money that will come into the system will more than compensate for the loss in revenue,” says Swamy. He says if he was finance minister he would push hard to abolish direct taxes but levy a surcharge of 1% on all banking transactions — while simultaneously pushing greater financial inclusion. “That would bring far more revenue than these taxes which lead people to hoard black money.”

Too simplistic a solution? Perhaps. But after many years in political wilderness, his views are of particular importance at this point in time; why? It lies in that if he was finance minister bit. In Swamy’s chequered political career, the wheel has come full circle. Once a prominent member of the Jan Sangh, the predecessor of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and traditionally close to the ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Swamy spent nearly three decades at the head of an ever diminishing Janata Party before rejoining the BJP (merging the last remnants of Janata in it) in August this year.

This came to pass even though there was, as one BJP leader put it to me, “tooth and nail opposition” to his entry into the party. The reason: Narendra Modi. It is well-known, though Swamy will not confirm it, that he could enter the BJP because Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate, insisted that he wanted Swamy in. The RSS which pushed out resistance to Modi’s ascension as PM-nominee lent its support. In this Modi has tried to create his own intellectual fulcrum within the party as Atal Bihari Vajpayee once created his — with Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie. If Modi becomes prime minister, Swamy could well be his finance minister — especially since Sinha was one of the early opponents to Modi (he has since come around to the party view). For Modi, this group seems to be coalescing around Swamy, Shourie, Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley.

Swamy does not deny his friendship with Modi. “I have known him for thirty years and was one of the first people who argue that he had it in him to be prime minister,” says the 73-year-old Harvard-trained economist. “There have been many attempts to create a rift between me and Modi — none have succeeded.” Is he then part of Team Modi in quite the way there was once a Team Vajpayee? Swamy is too idiosyncratic to say an outright yes but he will say this, “Modi and I understand each other.”

All this — anti-corporate crusader meets ultra-free market preacher meets conservative Hindu nationalist politician — is a complex mix. To understand it is to comprehend not just the economic mind of a man who started his career writing a definitive research paper on the theoretical aspect of index numbers with Paul Samuelson, or just the politics of a man so opposed to Communism that when told by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the giant of Indian socialism at the height of his powers as chief minister of Kerala in the late 1960s that Soviet Union had barely any poverty and if India followed its path, it too would soon have poverty, Swamy retorted, “Soon there will be no Soviet Union”.

But it is also to understand where both corporate India and the BJP stand today, why both need and fret about Swamy, Indian aviation policy and its past and present, and even how Swamy, a curious mix of mathematical intellect and aggressive piety, sees his own destiny.

One man who explains this best is the former chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Pradeep Baijal. Since the 2G scandal broke, Baijal has been questioned numerous times by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). His home in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, has been raided. When the 2G scam broke, Raja claimed that that he had only followed advice and precedence of the ministers and bureaucrats who had built policy before. Pradeep Baijal was the head of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India who had written a note saying that the first come, first serve basis could be used as a policy to give licenses. The then telecom minister Arun Shourie accepted the recommendation to push telecommunications depth especially in circles which were not very lucrative — and after the market showed no interest in participating in auctions for perceived low volume and value circles. But during Raja’s time real estate companies with little or no telecom experience and little past managerial experience in handling large scale businesses like mobile telephony were handed out licenses under dubious pretexts. The question was — what kickbacks ensured that such licenses were handed out? The investigations dragged in Baijal’s decision — especially since he had opened a consulting company with the assistance of Niira Radia, the public relations agent who was a go-between for several top corporate houses and the government. The CBI questioning means Baijal’s business is now shut and while nothing has been found to implicate him — and nothing was found in the raid — it practically ruined him.

But today Baijal has only praise for the man who was largely instrumental in triggering domino effects that also led to his downfall. “Subramanian Swamy is a genius,” says Baijal. “An example needed to be set that everyone could be held accountable. I was collateral damage in the process but I cannot not support what Swamy did. He fought for the truth. He burst the bubble.”

The way Baijal sees it, and has through 40 years of civil service, most public policy decisions in India are taken in collusion — where politicians of every hue and big business work together efficiently, and everyone’s interest is taken care of, so no one ever really disturbs the goodie train.

Swamy, he says, has shaken up the system.

“No one in government or anywhere else ever thought that that anyone could be held accountable before this. He did that.”

In politics — and these days also in economics — an activist of any renown must be larger than themselves, representative of an idea, a metaphor, even. Subramanian Swamy, the perpetual contrarian of Indian politics and public economics, revels today as the public pinprick, the thorny conscience to corporate-political deal making. Some would like to argue that he picks his battles with care and depending on the side he is betting on but the truth is somewhat different. One top Congress politician and former cabinet minister told, “if Swamy were that careful, he would have been finance minister, even prime minister long ago. But even his friends have learnt to fear him”. There is an example to justify the statement. Take the case of Ratan Tata. One of the biggest public relations coup of Gujarat Chief Minister in recent years is has been the transfer of the Tata Nano car factory from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand in Gujarat after protracted protests from villagers against the takeover of farm land.

Yet, on the eve of a make or break election for Modi, when Swamy’s future in any potential BJP government led by Modi is almost solely dependent on Modi, here is Swamy saying things like: “Ratan Tata has embarrassed his family by getting into a completely illegal airline deal”.

So it is that a man who for at least a decade has been laughed off in Indian politics, is suddenly taken dead seriously. Even when he first started talking about spectrum licenses, even though Delhi was abuzz with talk of corruption, no one really took him too seriously.

“But now India Inc does, they take him very seriously indeed,” says Kiran Karnik, former head of Nasscom, the apex software body, and chairman of the national committee on telecom and broadband of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Karnik says 2G judgement came as a wake-up call for Indian industry that in a time of a “governance vacuum” judicial activism spurned on by agitating public interest litigations could bring about sweeping judgement.

“The spectrum judgement seen by many as having thrown the baby out with the bathwater but there is a reason why this happens — it is because there are basic gaps in policymaking and clarity at a governmental level. There is no question of not taking someone like Swamy seriously anymore because the issues that he raises are being taken very seriously by the courts.”

Karnik says even in his latest aviation cases, Swamy’s judicial activism is “putting question marks on many things and some of these are going back to Etihad”. “There is no question of taking things lightly because one is unsure about things due to the many flip-flops,” says Karnik.

There is another reason for the wariness. If they come to fruition, the Air Asia and Singapore Airlines deals could salvage an increasingly debt ridden (and ever expensive for consumers) Indian aviation sector. For Jet, if the Etihad deal does not come through, it probably means the airline will go the same way as Kingfisher.

Domestic air travel is gone from the promise of being cheaper than trains to being nearly as expensive as the days when only Air India (or Indian Airlines) roamed the skies — and all within the last decade. The heydays of Rs. 1 promotional tickets and average of Rs. 1,500 — Rs. 2,000 between busiest Mumbai and Delhi route, mainly triggered by the launch of India’s first low cost airline Air Deccan in 2003, ended with its sale to Kingfisher Airlines by December 2007. At the time of sale, the combined entity had around 33% marketshare (22% Air Deccan and 11% Kingfisher). By the end of 2012, with losses of around $1.9 billion and debts of $2.5 billion, Kingfisher’s license to fly was cancelled by the Directorate of Civil Aviation, the airline regulator.

The demise of the country’s first low cost and first ‘five-star’ or premium airline — both, incidentally, started in 2003 — left a gap at the two ends of the market. Some of it was filled by newer airlines. Indigo, which now has a market share of 29.5%, Spicejet (19.8%) and GoAir has 9%.

The last decade has also seen the fall of a once-upon-a-time market leader Jet Airways which had a high of around 43% market share in 2004. Such was the domination of Jet that its first announcement of a proposed buyout of competitor Air Sahara had other airlines crying monopoly. But by the time the merger actually happened in 2007, the two airlines had a market share of only around 33%. Air Deccan was snapping at the heels of Jet (24.5%) with a fast-growing 17.5% share of passengers with its stated dream of making every Indian fly.

The other player in the story was venerable Air India which, as Indian Airlines (Air India was the international route arm; the two merged in 2007) had a market share of around 60% in 1998. By 2004, it was down to 40%.

Today the tide has dramatically turned for the old aviation players. Jet Airways plus its low cost carrier Jet Lite have together a market share of 22.5%, in Q2FY14 the airline posted its worst ever (consolidated) loss of Rs. 998 crores. It has debts of $1.9 billion. Of this $1.2 billion is against aircraft purchases and $700 million is borrowings from the Indian market.

Of these, Swamy says his objections to AirAsia and Singapore Airlines deals are simple and therefore he “hopes to win easily”. His objection is simple: Indian government rules allow foreign direct investment (FDI) into existing airlines.

“Is Mr Ratan Tata an existing airline in India” asks Swamy. Neither, he points out with a laugh, is Arun Bhatia, who is the third partner in the Asia Asia deal which is a joint venture between joint venture between Asia’s largest low-cost airline AirAsia Bhd (49%), Tata Sons Ltd (30%) and Arun Bhatia ofTelestra Tradeplace Pvt. Ltd (21%).

Swamy’s bone of contention is that the policy change in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) press note in September and within days aviation minister Ajit Singh had said that no license (or no objection certificate) would be given to greenfield projects.

But six months later the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) and its governing minister, the ministry of finance, cleared the AirAsia-Tata-Telestra proposal in spite of reservations of the civil aviation ministry. What swung the deal? Curiously, the argument was — one comma.

The press note on FDI policy read: “The government of India has reviewed the position in this regard and decided to permit foreign airlines also to invest, in the capital of Indian companies, operating scheduled and non-scheduled air transport services, up to the limit of 49% of their paid-up capital.”

The way the FIPB read it — the note was saying that FDI was allowed in Indian companies and operating airlines. Since both Tata-Singapore Airlines and AirAsia deal were going to be companies majority owned by an Indian company — 51% owned by Tata and Telestra in one, and 51% owned by Tata in the other — the FIPB saw no problem.

Aviation Minister Ajit Singh who was unavailable for comment but he has defended the change of stance pointing to another nuance — the note did not clarify whether the Indian company had to be formed before or afterseeking license. The suggestion is that the clearance given works if an Indian outfit is created before applying for license.

Swamy thinks this is completely illegal. “Can you imagine — they have brought down foreign policy down to grammar lessons! This is a case I shall win easily,” he says. “I am not against globalisation. I am against subterfuge.”

Jitender Bhargava, the former executive director of Air India, agrees with Swamy that the whole thing seems odd. “It is an extraordinary flip-flop and I think Swamy is right in going to court,” says Bhargava, who is the author of a new book The Descent of Air India. “If the courts thought it was a frivolous point, they would have dismissed it by now.”

Kapil Kaul is the head of the CAPA centre for aviation, an industry think-tank, says his impression is that of cases, Swamy is less serious about the Air Asia and Singapore Airlines case than Jet-Etihad.

“I think that will get resolved more swiftly,” says Kaul.

Because this is Swamy things are not just quite that simple. Because this is Indian politics things are not quite so cut and dry. At least five people told us that Swamy may have felt insulted by some of the things Fernandes said. Some examples cited included some comments from the Malaysian entrepreneur’s July press conference.

“I don’t think many people in Bombay have been Kochi. I don’t think many Indians have seen the Taj Mahal,” Fernandes said. “I don’t think many Indians have seen their own country.”

On his part Swamy only accepts, “I may have been egged on by some of the things he said but that’s not the only reason. He is a buccaneer. He has failed to make his business work in Japan and in other parts of the world. Even in the Malaysian parliament they don’t like him too much anymore.”

In June, AirAsia aborted a failed bid to enter the Japanese market selling its 49% stake in AirAsia Japan to its partner All Nippon Airways after losses of more than $35 million. In 2012, AirAsia pulled out of lucrative European routes like London citing varying demand and rising costs.

Neither AirAsia India or AirAsia Bhd answered queries but its counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi has argued in court that the Swamy’s petition is “motivated”. Singhvi is an erstwhile spokesperson of the ruling Congress Party which Swamy hates (he has a dossier of allegations against Congress heads Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, and is fighting a case accusing them of fraud). In the meantime, as Swamy’s case works its way through the Delhi High Court, he has also asked for clarification on another issue — who is really in control in the deal?

Rules say the majority shares and control of the airline has to be with Indian nationals. But Swamy in his petition has pointed out that “the Indian owners Tata and Telestra are bound by clauses in their agreements that would leave control with Malaysia’s AirAsia”. He argues that for all practical purposes the day to day control of the airline is with AirAsia since they are the operational partner and the investment of Tata Sons Ltd. is merely $9 million with no shareholder responsibility, which is the same as Telestra. There is no dispute in this argument since the Tatas, the Bhatias and Fernandes has said that operations are the domain of the Malaysian partner — now whether this constitutes a violation of law is a matter for the courts to judge.

The Jet-Etihad deal is considerably more complicated, not least because Jet owner Naresh Goyal is one of the most controversial characters in India Inc. It is widely rumoured that it was Goyal whose lobbying expertise prevented Ratan Tata from starting an airline despite several attempts in the last 15 years. Today most experts believe that the Jet-Etihad deal is in fact a simple financial bailout and preparing of grounds for future sale of Jet to Etihad. Some believe, internally the switch has already happened. For one simple reason: the deal was concluded in suspicious tandem with the announcement that the Indian government was expanding flight rights of Abu Dhabi (its flag carrier is Etihad).

Not least because the announcement that Etihad was buying 24% of Jet Airways came on the same day that India raised the allotment of seats to UAE from around 13,600 to 50,270 per week spread over the next three years. The $900 million payout includes $300 million in loan assistance, $150 million in Jet’s frequent flyer programme, $379 million as equity investment, and $70 million as leaseback of Jet’s slots in Heathrow. The rest is a cash infusion to cut debt.

What happens through this bilateral agreement is that both countries agree to allot more seats to airlines of each other. But because Jet is the biggest international operator in Indian skies, it gets maximum benefit — 44.8% of the increased allocations from Abu Dhabi (compared to 28.2% for Spice Jet and 27% for Air India). And here’s the catch, since Etihad owns a significant stake in Jet — and as experts suggest with all likelihood of an increase to 49% or de facto ownership of Jet — the benefits accrue massively to Etihad.

“Without this deal, Jet is another Kingfisher (meaning bankrupt),” says CAPA’s Kaul. “But in order to get the deal going, the government has offered an unprecedented sweetened deal to UAE of bilateral seat allocations that is designed to facilitate this deal. It’s a bizarre deal. I don’t think in any other market this would stand market scrutiny.

“For all practical purposes, Jet is on its way to becoming a local arm of Etihad. I have no doubt that its stake will increase and it will become a local carrier feeding into Etihad for international routes.” Jet will connect Etihad to 26 Indian cities and there will be direct flights to Abu Dhabi from eight Indian cities.

A ministry of finance bureaucrat pointed out that even in the recent clearance of Jet-Etihad deal by the Competition Commission of India, there was a dissenting member in the committee that cleared the proposal who said that it might have an adverse impact on competition in international flights.

Underlying this worry is the fear that with nearly 200,000 seats per week now given in bilateral ties only to Middle Eastern countries, India’s dreams of building Delhi or Mumbai as hubs may be coming to an end.

“And also in the future an overwhelming majority of international flights out of India will go via Doha, Sharjah, Dubai or Abu Dhabi. This is a strategic mistake,” says Kaul. “Ideally the thing to do is to spread bilateral ties to build hubs around the world.” For instance, Jet was using Brussels as a long haul stopover place which will now shift to Abu Dhabi.

In the world of airlines a hub — which airlines use for refuelling, maintenance and stopovers — are lucrative destinations with all sorts of allied industries from hospitality and catering to engineering services in spare parts. With Jet, and earlier Kingfisher, announcing long haul international flights, there had been a hope that Delhi or Mumbai will become a hub generating much revenue.

Etihad buying Jet is an extension of its strategy of investing in smaller airlines around the world — from Air Serbia and Air Berlin to Ireland’s Aer Lingus and Air Seychelles. “Etihad’s strategy is to use all of these into making Abu Dhabi a global hub and all these airlines as feeder airlines. In one sweep, we have lost an airline which had the capacity to be a great international private carrier from India,” says Kaul.

Aviation expert and the former India head of express cargo carrier DHL says the Jet-Etihad deal is like putting all eggs in one basket — that of the Middle East. “With colossal landing rights (for Etihad) and a fabulous premium (for Jet), this is merely a financial bailout package for Jet,” says Guzder. Kaul calls it a “big strategic mistake”.

But he disagrees with Swamy about the politician’s objection to Tata-Singapore and AirAsia. “This is exactly what has always happened in Indian aviation. It’s an oligopoly. Once a few people get in, they then try to shut the door behind them,” says Guzder.

There is a twist in the tale here. Naresh Goyal has a reputation for being able to keep away competitors when and how he wants. The House of Tatas has always wanted an airline since Air India which began as Tata Airline (it was renamed in 1946 when it became a Tata-government joint venture) in 1932 was nationalised in 1953.

At least in the last two decade, one of the key people preventing the entry of the Tatas (who have tried thrice before to start an airline with Singapore Airlines) has been Naresh Goyal and his masterly lobbying skills. As Kaul says, “It is incredible that the same airline which lobbied so hard that India did not need foreign airlines in the country is today one of the biggest beneficiaries of foreign direct investment.”

Swamy says he has no problem with investment from overseas but “Jet-Etihad is a much more sinister deal”. He points out that Jet is owned by Tailwinds (based in the tax haven of Isle of Man) whose ownership has been disclosed and says he suspects that the entirely deal is constructed for the airline finally to be sold to Etihad in its entirety. “That’s the conspiracy in this. And I have questioned why so many seats have been given away to Etihad.”

There is some nuance here — Goyal used to control Jet through his 100% ownership of Tailwinds. But Goyal is a London-based non-resident Indian and Tailwinds what used to be called an OCB or an overseas corporate body. In 2003, the RBI stopped recognising OCBs and Goyal could keep this holding pattern as a special relaxation by the government. But the transaction with Etihad could only be completed if the shares were transferred to him from Tailwinds. So in May, Tailwinds sold 2.51 crore shares in Jet to Goyal. This meant Goyal now had 65.99% of Jet and Tailwinds 9.01%. Goyal’s wife owns 1,000 shares and together the promoter group owns 75%. The rest is floated on the market.

Attempts to reach Etihad remained futile and Jet vice president corporate communisations Ragini Chopra said: “Since the matter is being pursued legally, it would not be appropriate to comment at this point. It is best that any clarification comes from the government side.”

There is consensus among everyone Fortune India spoke to that Etihad will look to own at least 49% of Jet in the near future, if not in its entirety. There is a reason for this. It fits in perfectly with Etihad strategy for the last few years across the world. In the world of airlines, it is well known that Etihad has been trying to play catch up with its tonier Middle Eastern cousins Emirates and Qatar Airways. Emirates, for instance, with 54,200 seats every week is already the biggest foreign airline flying Indians to and from the country. (Emirates got a deal similar to Etihad in 2008 in terms of number of seats but Swamy says that did not attract his attention because it was not a takeover of an Indian company “illegally”.)

But beneath the legal cases is the bedrock of the politics and economics of Subramanian Swamy. Some of the battles go back to his distaste for Finance Minister P. Chidambaram. Several people in the BJP suggested to me that one of the things that annoy Swamy is that he sees in the airline cases — quite like in 2G — Chidambaram’s hand in breaking the law. After all, it is the finance ministry and the FIPB which cleared the licenses in spite of the objection of the civil aviation ministry. Swamy laughs at this idea but in conversation, he constantly refers to Chidambaram as “the only one who go away but I haven’t given up yet”.

There’s economics too. This is man who finished a PhD in economics at Harvard and embraced America but also learnt Mandarin well enough to analyse Indian and Chinese economies and write a book in 1975 called Economic Growth in China and India where he argued that irrespective of popular theories that China had a much higher GDP growth than India, it was actually roughly the same. Curiously, his findings were given by the Chinese to the World Bank in 1980 to ask for aid — and when asked by the Bank why they needed aid since their economy was doing so well. His politics today veers between embracing capitalism and propagating state control. If that sounds contradictory, the best way to explain this is that he takes his inspiration of supporting or rejecting policies in a sort of Hindu way. The logic? Hinduism has no core text or key book. It is a faith of accumulated knowledge and constant reinterpretation. Swamy sees that as his position.

“I am not dogmatic,” says Swamy. “I accept or reject every issue on merit.” Take his stance on FDI in multi-brand retail for instance where his party did a classic flip flop (it was pro when in power but protested when the Congress tried to apply it last year). “I believe in parity,” says Swamy. “I am happy to welcome in, say, Walmart if the US allows Indians workers to go work in infrastructure in their country. Otherwise why should they low cost capital be applied in India to earn profit while India’s surplus labour cannot earn from their country?”

His nationalism means he likes to remind audiences in his speeches: “The Israeli cow gives 12,000 litres a year. The American cow gives 6,000 litres. Imagine if the Indian cow gave 12,000 litres a year! It would be an economic miracle!”

Swamy, whose early mentors and inspirations were Simon Kuznets, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, gave brought what can be called the idea of nationalist capitalism to the Jan Sangh in the 70s — a free market swadeshi, if you will. It was based on economic liberalism, complete breakaway from Nehruvian socialism and focus on building Indian infrastructure and enterprises including increased focus on agriculture. Even today he says linking Indian rivers — one of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s pet projects — and extensive irrigation for agriculture are the two projects closest to his heart. “We have forgotten the art of self sufficiency,” he says.

In the airline cases, this is why Swamy has taken the side of Air India at a time when the chorus for its sell-off grows louder. The national carrier has around Rs. 45,000 crores of accumulated debt — largely from a 2005 decision to upgrade the fleet by buying 68 new aircraft including 27 Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

“Air India will get wiped out in the kind of decisions we are taking,” says Swamy.

Jitender Bhargava agrees: “This deal is completely against national interest. What is the point of pumping in money into Air India to keep it afloat and yet take away passengers? Why have major investments to build modern airports if we don’t try and build hubs? There will be no second competitor in the India-Abu Dhabi sector.” Some of his concerns were echoed in the dissenting note given by one members of the Competition Commission of India which cleared the deal in November and said it would have adverse impact of the competition in international travel.

“There has never been a comprehensive policy on civil aviation. It’s a free for all.”

Guzder says that might be Swamy’s biggest hurdle. “The court might agree with Swamy and say you have a point, you are making valid arguments but where is the policy that in clear terms defines everything? On what do we base judgements? There isn’t one and that makes it tough for Swamy.

“As far as Air India is concerned, already the patient’s ECG and EEG are showing no flicker, these deals with cut both its international passengers and domestic and pull off the oxygen mask.” Guzder says while AirAsia and Tata-Singapore bring much needed competition in the sector and could help by expanding the aviation market, the worry is more about the Jet-Etihad deal and its impact.

Both Bhargava and Guzder say though that Swamy’s interventions are critical not just for these cases but also for larger business processes in India. “There is need for uninhibited questioning. He can do that. He is not scared.”

Swamy is unperturbed because he says “I cannot be bought off — both the netas and industrialists know that. So no one offers me anything. And if I had any problems, if I had done anything wrong, I would have been in prison long ago.”

As for the speculation of his relationship with Modi and where that will go, some clues can be found in a recent book he wrote called Virat Hindu Identity. In it he argues that the caste system as it exists today should be destroyed since it breaks the original thought that the castes are based on action, not birth and also about an old social contract that he thinks desperately needs to be revived.

“The spiritual elite of a culture creates the appropriate intellectual and political elite to manifest it in the outer world. This was the vedic ideal represented by the Brahmin and the Kshatriya, the king and the chief priest,” he writes. It is the apt metaphor for how he sees his relationship with Modi.

Early in my interview I asked him if he thought of himself and Modi as joint crusaders. “Quite formidable against untruth, isn’t it?” he said.

(A version of this essay was first published in the Indian edition of the Fortune magazine.) https://medium.com/p/ab752d0cf543