Amar Singh Came to Epitomise What Economic Liberalisation Did to Politics

Rajya Sabha MP Amar Singh first came to public notice when the H.D. Deve Gowda-led United Front (UF) government came to power in 1996. His proximity to Deve Gowda and the “special relationship” he shared with Samajwadi Party supremo and then Union defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav ensured that he was a familiar figure in that holy of holies, Delhi’s South Block. He was not a minister; he didn’t hold an official position in government, but he would often be seen emerging from the pink sandstone building when cabinet meetings broke. He, however, a member of the UF’s steering committee, and had friends across party lines.

Lutyens’ Delhi has always had its share of middlemen, facilitators and power brokers, teaching neophyte MPs how to negotiate the labyrinthine corridors of power, securing good press – and facilitating “deals” for the more experienced politicians. But Amar Singh took it several notches higher, initiating the corporatisation of politics.

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The North Avenue flat that had been allotted to him in the 1990s and which he converted into an office was emblematic of this change in politics. After he had renovated it, it resembled a plush business centre at a five-star hotel, quite unlike the dusty political party offices that journalists were used to. And it came complete with a glamorous secretary who would have been more at home in the higher echelons of the corporate world.

Most power brokers before this operated in the shadows, but not Amar Singh. He firmly believed that if you had it, you needed to flaunt it. He made sure that journalists spotted him often in South Block and, some years later, at a party he hosted at Delhi’s Hotel Ashoka, it seemed as though all of Mumbai’s Page 3 A-listers from the corporate and film worlds had flown in. If his friendship with matinee idol Amitabh Bachchan had ensured an entry into the film world – thanks to the fact that he had arranged funds for the actor when he was going through bad times – the two men fell out in later years, only to be reconciled shortly before his death.

The epitome of what liberalisation did to politics

In the 1990s, Amar Singh had already been on the fringes of politics for some years, starting as a Youth Congress activist in Kolkata. He first caught the Congress’s Vir Bahadur Singh’s eye, and then that of Madhav Rao Scindia. He once boasted to this writer, “I often stay in Madhav Raoji’s Gwalior palace. I have often had red wine and caviar with the Maharani.” Unsophisticated he might have been, but there was not a hint of social awkwardness. The son of a Burra Bazaar lock maker who specialised in tijoris (treasure chests) – with roots in Uttar Pradesh’s eastern district of Azamgarh – he was ambitious, ruthless and knew how to make a career out of networking with the rich, powerful and famous.

Through the 1990s, Amar Singh came to epitomise what economic liberalisation had done to politics in this country.

He brought the opulence – and enticements – of corporate India and Bollywood to the Samajwadi Party and its members who until then had sworn by Lohia, khadi and austerity.

Those who had spent a lifetime in the party both resented his presence and resisted his rapid rise. But Mulayam Singh, mesmerised by the allurements of big money and big entertainment, allowed Amar Singh to became the public face of the party. Adroitly, he juggled his dual role as Mulayam’s chief confidant with that of a Page 3 regular, rubbing shoulders with industrialists and socialites. Indeed, he accompanied the SP supremo on his first official visit to London as chief minister, even sharing a suite of rooms with his patron, according to officials who were on the trip. For those in the party and government, the message was loud and clear: Amar Singh was special.

In the process, he not only changed the ideological character of the SP, but he also set members of  Mulayam Singh’s family against each other to gain control of the SP – even conspiring with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when he felt the need arose. He worked hard to set Akhilesh Yadav against his younger half-brother, Prateek, and later Akhilesh Yadav against his uncle, Shivpal Yadav, who formed a breakaway SP, ahead of the assembly elections in UP in 2017, thus helping the BJP.

All through these years, Mulayam Singh, dazzled by the new world that he had been introduced to, succumbed. At an iftaar hosted by the latter in 2008, the SP supremo stood under a tree on the lawns of his official residence deep in conversation with Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav. Amar Singh made up the third in the circle, while the Bihar leader’s facilitator, who was also an MP, stood respectfully at a distance. For Lalu Prasad, important political conversations were held with equals, not in the presence of fixers.

A grinding halt

Even before the UF came to power, the external environment – politically – had been congenial for Amar Singh. He had the late Madhavrao Scindia’s friendship to flaunt during P.V. Narasimha Rao’s years as prime minister. And after the UF lost power, and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s reign in Delhi began, his closeness to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya and a senior minister ensured that he was seen as wielding clout in Delhi.

All that came to a grinding halt when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) assumed power.

The first signal came from Congress president Sonia Gandhi. She made it more than clear that he was an unwelcome guest when he arrived with the then Communist Party of India (M) general secretary H.K.S. Surjeet at her residence for the first coalition-building meeting after the UPA formed the government. Amar Singh made it worse for himself by publicising his “humiliation”, as he did a few months later when Delhi’s elite Sanskriti School withdrew the admission it had given to his twin daughters. Infuriated, he vowed to take revenge, but to little purpose. As a senior civil servant put it at that time, “Delhi is a cruel city—instead of evoking sympathy, the incident just underlined the fact that Amar Singh had lost his clout.”

With the UPA in power in Delhi, he found himself operating in a “hostile” environment. In Uttar Pradesh, the then chief minister Mulayam Singh’s family began to call the shots, and his activities were severely curtailed. The CM’s younger brother, Shivpal Singh Yadav, held sway over the day-to-day administration, while his son, Akhilesh Yadav, the MP from Kannauj by then, was clearly being groomed for a bigger role. Cousin and Rajya Sabha MP Ramgopal Yadav continued to hold his own. And Shivpal and Akhilesh made no secret of their dislike for Amar Singh in party circles. (Later, after Akhilesh Yadav became chief minister, Amar Singh broke the nephew-uncle alliance by working on the uncle’s thwarted ambitions.)

The once powerful confidante of Mulayam Singh found his ambit of activity in Uttar Pradesh reduced to chairing the Uttar Pradesh Development Council, which had begun on a high-profile note with members like industrialists Anil Ambani, Subroto Roy, Kumar Mangalam Birla and Adi Godrej, and Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador. Amar Singh, though still a member of the parliamentary board at the time, found he had virtually no say in the political management of the SP, nor in ensuring important assignments for his favoured officials.

By the second half of 2005, word had got around Delhi that Amar Singh no longer wielded the clout he once did. I sought an interview at the time on behalf of Outlook, the magazine I worked for then. Singh chose the lobby of a five star hotel rather than his home for the meeting. As he walked into the lobby, dressed in a candy-striped kurta, the usual trappings of power followed him. Gun-toting Black Cats underlined his VIP status. As he sat down, two sharp suited young men came and touched his feet. Except for the fact that I had noticed — as I had come in 15 minutes early — that the young men had been “arranged”. They had arrived around the time I had and were hovering around, as though they were looking for someone. He evidently wanted me to feel that he hadn’t lost his clout. But the trademark Amar Singh swagger and bravado were absent that day.

“I don’t throw parties anymore, I don’t attend parties and I don’t meet journalists at home,” he said to me, uncharacteristically downbeat. Was it because he was no longer No. 2 in the SP? “That’s just Congress propaganda. In the SP, there is only one No. 1, no No. 2, 3, 4 or 5. Everyone is given the opportunity to perform and outperform the others. Mulayam Singhji is the umbrella.” Then why do Akhilesh and Shivpal not like him? “That’s not true,” he said. “Akhilesh touches my feet; Shivpal gives me a great deal of respect.”

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All the sings were there

But the signs were all there. Amar Singh’s altered status in Delhi coincided with the UPA’s ascent: it robbed him of his key utility. The changes within the state were more gradual. In 2002, the SP emerged as the single largest party but failed to secure a majority. At that time, it was Shivpal Yadav who played a key role in mobilising MLAs, something that could not have been done just with money. This success catapulted Shivpal Yadav to centre stage and gave him a larger role in administrative affairs and in crucial transfers and postings.

But Amar Singh was clearly nervous that day. He asked me whether I had spoken to Mulayam Singh. I said I had tried but since he was in Lucknow, it was proving hard. So he said, “I will ask him to call you.” Sure enough, at around 11 pm, I received a call from Mulayam Singh, nervously giggling, wanting to know why I was writing about Amar Singh.

If the advent of the UPA had turned Amar Singh’s world topsy-turvy, it had also made Mulayam Singh vulnerable. Instead of playing kingmaker in Delhi as he had hoped, he had to cope with a hostile Central government, not helped by his closeness to Amar Singh. So while he had increased the role of other party figures, he could not afford to alienate Amar Singh either, privy as he was to all aspects of his life for well over a decade.

The UP CM sounded distinctly on edge on the phone: “Amar Singh joined the SP not because of politics but because he is like my younger brother. Maine usko sab kaam saunp diya hai. Look at all the work he does—he brought Clinton, the Taj Mahotsav, the UPDC.” Why did the CM’s family not like him then? Mulayam laughed nervously, “That’s not true.” And plans on his successor? The 64-year-old CM retorted, “Why, have I grown so old? I can run faster than any young man.”

Amar Singh had another brief moment in the sun in 2008, when the UPA’s Manmohan Singh reached out to him to secure the support of the SP in parliament for the nuclear deal it signed with the US. The national security adviser M.K. Narayanan briefed Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh on the deal at an undisclosed venue, and Singh, flattered by the notice, got the SP on board. That year, at the UPA’s fourth-anniversary celebrations, Amar Singh was invited and a chair reserved at the high table – where Manmohan Singh was seated – for him. When he finally arrived, the chair had been occupied by Karan Singh. But Manmohan Singh compensated for it by walking up to the table where Amar Singh was seated. The point was made and Amar Singh was appeased.

One last flutter

The last time he caused a political flutter was in July 2018, when he attended an event addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Lucknow, and dropped hints that he might join the saffron party. He had been expelled by the SP the previous year. Modi, who was launching investment projects pegged at over Rs 60,000 crore, said he was not afraid of being seen with industrialists playing a key role in the nation’s development, “Those who do not meet publicly and do everything behind curtains remain scared,” he said, adding that Amar Singh could provide all the details. Those present said that he was clearly pleased with the attention.

At the time of his death of multiple complications in Singapore at the age of 64 on August 1, he was an independent Rajya Sabha MP: he had been elected with the backing of the SP, as Mulayam Singh continued to have a soft spot for him. Sharp-tongued, unafraid to reveal the secrets of the rich and famous, he leaves the world of political trade and commerce – as a journalist phrased it – poorer.

Smita Gupta is a senior journalist.