Subramanian Swamy

Subramanian Swamy (born 15 September 1939) is an Indian politician, economist and conspiracy theorist.

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.

Subramanian Swamy was born on 15 September 1939, in Mylapore, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, to a family which hailed originally from Madurai in Tamil Nadu in a Tamil Brahmin family.

His father, Sitaraman Subramanian, was a bureaucrat and his mother, Padmavathi, was a homemaker.

He has one younger brother, Ram Subramanian, as well as two younger sisters.

Sitaraman Subramanian was an officer in the Indian Statistical Service who served as the director of the Central Statistical Institute in Delhi, and was a statistical adviser to the Government of India.

The family, which hailed from Madurai in Tamil Nadu, moved to New Delhi when Swamy was only six months old.

Due to his father's job and the family's Tamil roots, major national leaders like K. Kamaraj, C. Rajagopalachari and S. Satyamurti often visited Sitaraman.

He attended Hindu College, University of Delhi, from where he earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematics.

He then took his master's degree in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

While he was a doctoral student at Harvard, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a cross-registered student and later worked at the United Nations Secretariat in New York City as an Assistant Economics Affairs Officer in 1963.

He subsequently worked as a resident tutor at Lowell House at Harvard University.

Swamy met Roxna Kapadia, whose father was member of Indian Civil Service (British India) and an Indian lady of Parsi ethnicity who was studying PhD in mathematics at Harvard University.

He was later recommended by Hendrik S. Houthakker and went to study at Harvard University on a full Rockefeller scholarship, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1965, with his thesis titled Economic Growth and Income Distribution in a Developing Nation.

His thesis adviser was Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets.

In July 1965, immediately after obtaining his PhD in economics from Harvard, Swamy joined the Department of Economics at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences as an assistant professor.

They were married in June 1966.

Swamy has two daughters.

The elder daughter, Gitanjali Swamy, is an entrepreneur and private equity professional.

She is married to Sanjay Sarma, a professor at MIT, who is the son of E.A.S Sarma, a retired IAS officer and former secretary of Economic Affairs to the government of India.

The younger daughter, Suhasini Haidar, is a print and television journalist married to Nadeem Haidar, the son of former Indian Foreign Secretary Salman Haidar.

in 1969, he was made an associate professor.

As an associate professor, he was invited by Amartya Sen to occupy the chair on Chinese studies at the Delhi School of Economics.

He accepted the offer and even travelled to India to take up the position, but his appointment was cancelled at the last minute due to his views on India's economic policy and also its nuclear policy.

at that time, India was still partially oriented towards socialism and the "command economy" model instituted by Nehru, and Swamy was a believer in market economy.

Thereafter, Swamy moved to the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi where he was a full Professor of Mathematical Economics there from 1969 to the early 1970s.

He was removed from the position by its board of governors in the early 1970s because of his disapproval of Indira Gandhi's poor economic policies but was legally reinstated in the late 1990s by the Supreme Court of India.

He served on the Board of Governors of the IIT, Delhi (1977–80) and on the Council of IITs (1980–82).

He continued in the position until 1991 when he resigned to become a cabinet minister.

Between 1994 and 1996, Swamy was Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade under former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao.

He also taught economics courses at Harvard Summer School until 2011, when the Harvard faculty voted to eliminate Swamy's courses as a result of his "offensive" statements about Muslims.

Swamy currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the SCMS Group of Institutions, which includes the SCMS Cochin School of Business in Kochi.

Swamy's career started with his involvement in the Sarvodaya movement, which was an apolitical movement but which formed the foundation of the creation of Janata Party later.

The real turn in his political career came after his sacking from IIT.

Liberal economic policies put forward by him did not go well with the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who sneered at his plans as 'Santa Claus with unrealistic ideas'.

Swamy was a long-time member of the Janata Party, serving as its president until 2013 when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

He has written on foreign affairs of India dealing largely with China, Pakistan and Israel.

He was nominated to Rajya Sabha on 26 April 2016 for a six-year term, ending on 24 April 2022.