This country has suffered many a misfortune but none greater than the vice and persistence in our public life of a despicable character called Subramanian Swamy. His has been a life of character assassination, malicious mendacity and sordid blackmail of any one who happens to cross his path. No body has been able to deflect him from his criminal course of conduct because few have the inclination to take on this vicious viper and expose him for what he really is.

Most good men have no stomach for controversies and fights at the Swamy level. To make mean attacks on those who in good faith have helped him in life is his speciality. And behind all his evil is one fostering frustration that he has not become the Prime Minister of India!

True, democracy must take in its stride even dangerous megalomaniacs like him, but equally the people must know what they are dealing with. This diseased insect cannot be disinfected. He has to be crushed and carefully incinerated. It is not enough to throw him into the gutter.That is his natural habitat. There he will grow and flourish.

The witnesses to prove this damning thesis are legion. This virulent viper's targets have been many. Scores who have silently borne his impertinent insults can be cited. For lack of space only a few instances would suffice. Let us take the venerable R. Venkataraman, a politician who adorned the Rashtrapati Bhawan and is now a universally respected elder statesman. In his book, My Presidential Years, he records:

"Early in October, a file recommending the appointment of Roxana Subramanian Swamy as Additional Judge of the Delhi High Court came to me with the recommendation of all the constitutional authorities. Mrs Swamy had completed 10 years and four months at the bar, just a few months more than the minimum qualification fixed under the Constitution. Her income was stated to be Rs 20,000 per annum during 1989 and 1990. There were a number of women lawyers in the Delhi High Court with greater standing and with far greater income from theprofession. To overlook all of them and appoint a person with Mrs Swamy's standing and practice would have been an affront to the bar. I therefore returned the file to the Prime Minister for reconsideration. Dr Subramanian Swamy mounted a tirade against me in the Central Hall of Parliament and outside which I ignored. I had never been either pressured or cajoled to act against my conviction.''

What did Venkataraman suffer for doing his constitutional duty of preventing an unworthy appointment on the Delhi High Court Bench? Dr Swamy accused Venkataraman of having harboured at the Rashtrapati Bhawan an Indian naval officer who confessed to have been a spy for Pakistan! He alleged Venkataraman had written that paragraph in his book only to cover up the fact that Venkataraman's daughter had misused the Rashtrapati Bhawan stationery to collect Rs 18 crore for a private Trust which she misrepresented as being an official Trust. Venkataraman knew, alleges the malevolent Dr Swamy, that the latter was investigatinghis daughter.

Chidambaram, Moopanar, Karunanidhi, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Margaret Alva have had one time or the other become the victims of this man's concoctions and perjury. He virulently attacked Rajiv Gandhi and even insulted Sonia Gandhi. Later he pretended to be a long lost friend and become a beneficiary of the family's political games. Publicly he claimed that Rajiv wanted him to be the Prime Minister of India but he generously passed on the gift to Chandra Shekhar. He professed to have become a Rajiv admirer in 1985 but he was shown to be a liar when confronted with what he wrote of him in 1987:

"The media blitz had worked admirably and a new synthetic colossus strode at the political landscape after 1984 in the persona of Rajiv Gandhi. That synthetic image has been blown. The media bubble has been pricked; Rajiv Gandhi warts and all, except to a few like Akbar. He should be seen for what he always was: an inexperienced semi-literate with no clue as to where he wants to take the country andtherefore unfit to be prime minister of a great country like India.''

I do not believe that Rajiv wanted to humiliate the Indian nation by making Swamy its Prime Minister.

I was introduced to Dr Swamy during the Emergency in New York by my Late friend Makrand Desai of Gujarat. I was teaching in the USA then. I regard him as a colleague and even extended hospitality and cooperation to him. He shared some of my views on international and political affairs and through his meandering course in the Janata Party, Lok Dal and new incarnation of the Janata Party, I only watched his crooked movements but hardly ever crossed his path. I took notice of him when as Chandra Shekhar's Law Minister, he took some actions which I regarded as abominable and corrupt. He tried to scuttle the investigation against a corrupt Supreme Court judge by taking the view that the motion of impeachment had lapsed on the dissolution of the House.

The Supreme Court reversed his opinion and action. He tried to scuttle the Boforsinvestigation by encouraging a law officer to make a stupid confession to the Court that the FIR disclosed no offence. This provoked the upright Madhavan to interrupt counsel and courageously tell the judge that his own counsel was exceeding his brief. Madhavan earned Swamy's wrath. Fortunately the Supreme Court put an end to this unscrupulous stratagem.

Chandraswami is his bosom friend. Long an absconder from justice, he returned to India only when his friend Chandra Shekhar was installed as Prime Minister and Swamy as Law Minister. When he arrived in India, Swamy received him at the Airport, presumably both for himself and the Government of India.

CBI Joint Director N.K. Singh was investigating the St. Kitts forgery case in which Chandraswami is even now an accused. Swamy and his Government shifted that honest officer and thereby the investigation was delayed for at least two years. I have frustrated Swamy's designs and I have become an eyesore to him.

What finally has made Swamy desperate iscuriously connected with Dr Jayalalitha, his present ally and mentor. He had through Chandra Shekhar brought down the DMK Government in Tamil Nadu, on the allegation that the LTTE was flourishing during the DMK regime.

Jayalalitha was the gainer. Politically, he remained her friend, but according to his own public statement, only up to about April, 1992. By August 1992 he had started attacking her.