It’s perhaps an irrelevant detail, but somehow seems significant in the context of Amar Singh and the political soap opera he has set in motion.
He was in the world’s tallest building – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, when he decided to roll the political dice yet again. Amar Singh shot off a letter to his leader, Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, resigning from all the party posts he held. The apparent gamble was to force Mulayam’s hand and wrest back some of the party’s power levers from the leader’s emergent son, Akhilesh Yadav.
But Amar Singh didn’t have the luck of the dice. Blood proved thicker than the 14-year-old relationship between him and Mulayam Singh. With a “heavy heart”, Mulayam accepted the resignation, while his sidekicks launched a broadside against Amar Singh to indicate that the “heavy heart” business was just political politeness; Mulayam Singh was actually happy to see him go. The curtains were, indeed, falling on the logic-defying relationship between Mulayam, an ace practitioner of cow-belt caste politics, and Amar Singh, a wily corporate dogsbody-turned-politician , who prospered more in five-star hotel lobbies than the killing fields of electoral politics.
The curtains finally came down on Monday when Amar Singh was expelled from the Samajwadi Party. The portly politician, who has emerged also as an impresario of the glamour world, exited with his Bollywood entourage – the two Jayas, Jaya Prada and Jaya Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt and Manoj Tiwari – none of whom are relevant to the OBC politics of Mulayam Singh. But it was all so typical of Amar Singh. His associations have always been larger-than-life, be it his “family ties” with the Bachchans, Jaya Prada and other glamour queens and badshahs, or his alleged friendships in the corporate world, or his positioning himself on top of the world at the 2,717-feet tall Burj Khalifa before dispatching his resignation letter. Without mega drama, it can’t quite be Amar Singh.
There have been few political mavericks like the 53-year-old Thakur – born in Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh and bred in Kolkata – who came into his own in Delhi’s corridors of power. When he reached the capital in search of a fortune, he was known as an industrialist , although no one was quite sure which industry he owned. Soon he dived fulltime into politics, while exhibiting awesome networking abilities. He would be seen at all parties and gatherings of notables, schmoozing corporate bigwigs, media barons, influential bureaucrats and promising politicians. He was all over the place with his ready wit, earthy anecdotes, his selfadvertised trouble-shooting prowess, connecting industrialists with politicians, media barons with bureaucrats, and everyone else with each other.
Before you could spell Amar Singh, the man had emerged as a vital cog in the giant power maze of Delhi called the System. Few, it was said, could work the system as well as he did. He even became a director of a nationalised bank and P V Narasimha Rao inducted him on the Air India board. This was the time when he came in touch with Mulayam Singh to seed a friendship that is now as much a mystery as it is history. Now the nawab of networking is floundering – without many political friends, without a party, and none ready to accommodate him.
But he is hanging in with grim determination. He saw to it he did not have to resign, and wore a triumphant look after he was expelled (” I’m relieved,” he said after his expulsion). Indeed, it was a small victory for him. Expulsion not only meant that he had succeeded in exasperating the Samajwadi leadership, it also meant he would hold on to his Rajya Sabha membership, and retain his access to Parliament, as well as to his plush government bungalow at 27, Lodhi Estate, which has had a makeover under his loving eyes. You cannot but marvel at the wily politician’s ability to profit from even the most hopeless of situations.
The talk right now isn’t about Mulayam Singh parting with Amar Singh – that they stuck together for so long was a surprise – but why the two were bickering like divorcing spouses. The million-dollar question has spawned a hundred theories. Samajwadi leaders make light of it. An SP biggie joked: “Sabse badi imarat pe baithe the. Neeche hum sab baune lag rahe honge. Achanak socha hoga chhodo in piddiyon ko. (He was in the world’s tallest building. All of us must have looked like dwarfs from there. He suddenly thought – let me get away from this lot of small creatures).” Most political jokes work at several levels; so does this one.
It’s said that ideology had nothing to do with Amar Singh’s sudden disillusionment with the “casteist” Samajwadi Party and its leader. Rather, it was a shrewd assessment of his future, not only in relation to Akhilesh Yadav, but in the context of the party itself which appeared to be condemned to the opposition benches in the foreseeable future, both in Delhi and Lucknow. Mohan Singh, Amar Singh’s latest bete noire who has been made the party spokesman in his place, sniggered, “Yeh woh bhaurein hain jo sookhi hui shakh pe nahin baithte (he is one of those bees that doesn’t sit on dried up branches)”, to suggest that Amar Singh has left to look for greener pastures and explain why the Samajwadi lot seemed a bunch of dwarfs to him.
The prospect of a life of agitations and anti-government bytes, while fobbing off sniper attacks from an increasingly impatient Lohiaite-Socialist bloc within the SP, was not quite the life that Amar Singh looked forward to. For a man who two years back had engineered one of the most dramatic political turnarounds in living memory to get the America-hating SP to support the India-US unclear deal and save the UPA government , this tough life in the opposition was not one to die for (or lose his kidneys for). “Struggle was for socialists, not for Thakur Amar Singh!,” said a party MP.
Amar Singh’s impatience had been growing. The signs were there to see when he didn’t help finance the Ferozabad by-poll , even though the honour of the first bahu – Akhilesh’s wife, Dimple – was at stake. And he washed his hands of the local body elections where money often dictates the outcome. SP fell flat in both contests. Akhilesh’s accusation that Congress won Ferozabad through “money power” actually betrayed a lament about how SP was short of cash. For over the next one month, the simmering difference became a full-blown soap opera. OB vans of news channels parked themselves outside Singh’s Lodhi Estate residence and the Copernicus Marg office of the SP, as the political potboiler, oozing with forgive-and-forget grandiloquence, emotional talk of betrayal, patent greed, melodrama, even threats of blackmail, unfolded on the small screen, 24×7.
The “saas-bahu ” touch to the drama was apparent right from the beginning. As Amar Singh’s helicopter hovered over Ferozabad on nomination day, a group of Samajwadi leaders, including Anil Rajbhar and Ramasrey Kushwaha, were waiting for it to land. Kushwaha is said to have muttered under his breath “the party would be delivered if the chopper crashed” . Rajbhar squealed, and Amar Singh cried foul. The outrage was, of course, a pretext to force the moment, but the drama was one hundred per cent original. As the political pot-boiler progressed, Amar Singh suddenly took to blogging (inspired by Amitabh Bachchan, it’s said) to project to a larger audience that his differences with his party were a clash of worldviews – just as the US used the McDonald burger and rock music in the Cold War to drum up the beat of “freedom” , Amar Singh was using English, computers and blogging to spam his message of liberty.
Even so, many thought the indulgent Mulayam Singh would wink at his Man Friday’s antics. But he was caught unawares by the depth of the anti-Amar Singh feelings in the party’s “socialist-Lohiaite” vanguard . It’s said Mulayam tried to salvage the situation till the last moment but just couldn’t overcome this group’s hostility towards Amar Singh. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a one-way street when Amar shone brightly in the SP. Even his rivals concede that he helped the party make its transition in a changed economy that was altering the electoral complexion with growing urbanisation. It was, indeed, a big moment for this party of the hinterland to host the Godrejs and the Ambanis , the Bachchans and Jaya Pradas, all of whom came courtesy Amar Singh. At least, the middle class didn’t snigger at Mulayam Singh anymore.
The question is where will Amar Singh go now. He has heaped fulsome praise on Sonia Gandhi and Mayawati, but the two ladies are not biting. But then, nothing is never in politics. Amar Singh has nailed up a “I-am-available” board. Many are betting that sooner rather than later, some sucker will show interest.
