O n Sunday, February 5, after the biggest week of his career, Subramanian Swamy strode into a public meeting in Mumbai. In a darkened auditorium, he dug deep into India’s history to show a rapt audience how “Indian traditions and old values” did not support corrupt practices. Through his hour-long lecture, the Janata Party president elicited thunderous applause, repeated slogans and chants of “Vande Mataram” and “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, and much tittering when he launched his trademark broadsides against the Nehru-Gandhi parivar.

The lecture—organised by Sucheta Dalal’s Moneylife Foundation—was focused on the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent verdicts centred on the 2G scam. Though all of them were there to attend a lecture on financial literacy, you could be forgiven for thinking that the few hundred-strong audience (largely middle- and upper-middle-class) were right-wingers. Many, incidentally, were from the Anna Hazare movement where too anti-corruption zeal and...