Club Lunch: How the Mighty Have Fallen: Anti-Corruption Efforts in India

Dr. Swamy shared his views on the roots of corruption in high offices in India, provide a couple of well known examples, and provided an update on his efforts and results in those cases. The speaker also highlighted how to transform one individual’s pioneering effort into a systematic way to fight and root out corruption in high offices. Significant cases initiated and pursued by Dr Swamy include a summons issued by a trial court against Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi for Cheating and Breach of Trust in the National Herald case; a disproportionate Assets case against J. Jayalalitha, Chief Minister of Tamil; a petition to the Supreme Court to force the Election Commission to introduce Voter-verified Paper Audit Trail along with Electronic Voting Machines.

The speaker is a member of Indian Parliament from April 2016 onwards having served 5 earlier terms. He is currently a member of Standing Committee of Parliament. He had been a Union Cabinet Minister for Commerce, Law & Justice, Chairman (with Cabinet rank), Commission of Labour Standards & International Trade, Chairman, Strategy Action Committee of BJP for the National Elections 2014. Dr. Swamy taught Economics at Harvard University for nearly 20 years including as a Visiting Professor and also taught Economics at Delhi School of Economics and at IIT-Delhi. He has 3.15 million followers on Twitter in India.