Subramanian Swamy Quotes
I think the BJP is a joke. It is a party of semi-literates and has fascist tendencies. Such a party can never have real roots in India because Hinduism is the antithesis of fascism.
Swamy, Subramanian. Interview by V. Venkatesan. "A Defeat for the RSS." Frontline, vol. 17, no. 5, 17 Mar. 2000.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
This quotation comes as a surprise to most readers who are amazed that the first American Legion National Commander described the role of the Legion as parallel to that of Mussolini and the Fascists of Italy. The early Legion leadership were themselves very right wing and fascistic themselves. See {640098} which shows that the Legion of that time was fomenting race hatred against Asians. The Legion leadership was not alone in its fascist tendencies; many of the right wingers from Charles Lindbergh to Joseph Kennedy—father of JFK were admirers of the fascists and advocated many of their practices. They even praised Hitler and Mussolini.
Hindutva is an extreme, right wing, Hindu, nationalist philosophy that is very anti-Muslim and divisive. See {641952}.
Subramanian Swamy is an Indian politician, economist and statistician, who serves as a nominated Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament. Before joining politics, he was a professor of Mathematical Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is known for his Hindu nationalist views. Swamy was a member of the Planning Commission of India and was a Cabinet Minister in the Chandra Shekhar government. Between 1994 and 1996, Swamy was Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade under former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao. Swamy was a long-time member of the Janata Party, serving as its president until 2013 when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
