Subramanian Swamy

Subramanian Swamy is an Indian economist and politician. He was born on 15 September 1939 and took a PhD in economics at Harvard in 1965. He is a living public figure, so his statements below are given as his own, with their sources, and the judgments are labelled as his.

According to Wikipedia he was president of the Janata Party from December 1990 until 2013, when he joined the BJP on 11 August 2013 and the party merged into it. He was a Union Minister from 10 November 1990 to 21 June 1991 under Chandra Shekhar, and he entered the Rajya Sabha again by nomination in 2016.

What he has said on the Punjab questions

• Operation Blue Star: after his nomination to the Rajya Sabha in 2016, speaking at Phagwara, he called the Army's June 1984 entry into the Golden Temple complex "a foolish step which was done without proper thinking." He said he had opposed it strongly, that many Hindus were angry with him for it, and that he lost an election but did not mind. He asked that the Operation Bluestar files be made public (Sanskriti Magazine).
• In the same report he alleged that the USSR pressed Indira Gandhi on the advice of Indian communists, whom he said feared that a Sikh revival would hurt communism. This is his claim; the report does not offer evidence for it.
• On Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, he described him as a religious preacher who, in his view, spoke against narcotics (Sanskriti Magazine). In a piece on Operation Bluestar attributed to him he wrote that Bhindranwale never advocated Khalistan, that government and media spread disinformation about him, and that the operation was a "horrible blunder" that would worsen violence rather than contain it. He also wrote that Rajiv Gandhi called the Anandpur Sahib Resolution antinational and read phrases such as "Raj Karega Khalsa" as signs of Khalistani sympathy, which Swamy calls innocuous (All About Sikhs).
• Kartarpur corridor: at Chandigarh on 24 August 2019 he said work on the corridor should stop in the national interest, calling this his personal opinion, and argued that India should not give Pakistan an opening for talks. The same day he repeated that he opposed what happened in Operation Bluestar and understood Sikh sentiments "very well," but said Sikhs should first understand Pakistan's intentions (The Tribune).

He is remembered in this record as a BJP politician who has criticised the Army action of 1984 and the way the Punjab crisis was framed, while also taking positions on Pakistan and the Kartarpur corridor that many Sikhs dispute. Those are separate statements, made years apart.