 "The second coming of Amar Singh")
"I was born and grew up in a three-room flat on 202 Chittaranjan Avenue. There were five of us and only one bathroom. I still remember the torture of the mornings when all of us used to queue up before the toilet. Since then I have an obsession with big bathrooms. Every room in my Greater Kailash House has a bathroom. I've seen those days, and the days when I left home because I didn't want to carry on with the trading business my father wanted me to continue. I had nothing. Proud fathers get suits stitched for their sons. I paid for my first suit myself when I was 28. Those ten years were a period of great struggle. So I'm afraid of nothing. What's the worst that can happen? That I go back to those days ? So what! I've survived those.” These words, brimming with defiance, resilience and survival, don’t sound out of place coming from glamour-sprinkled erstwhile kingmaker, confidant of India’s who’s who, and the king of political possibilities, Amar Singh, who is now on the cusp of a second coming.
A Rajya Sabha nomination at the instance of Mulayam Singh Yadav puts him back in the heart, and heartland, of politics. Singh began his career as a friend and supporter of the Congress. He was Madhavrao Scindia’s Man Friday, but tired of hanging on to the coat-tails of Congress politicians, elected to go into business – and politics - for himself.
In small towns across the Hindi heartland of UP, MP and Bihar, there is a class of traders and businessmen that rushed to open demat accounts in the early 2000s. For them, Singh is the symbol of what they can achieve. In these parts, he’s known as a man who can make things work. He may be unashamedly feudal in the way he works, but he could leverage and network to get doors opened.
Singh has never been less than frank about his abilities. His first memorable business deal was for Vam Organics where he worked. "Alcohol-based chemical industries were booming so long as I was there," he said. The industrial alcohol market was tightly regimented and controlled by the UP government. How did he manage to make a success of business in that environment? "By representing to the government and by networking - through bureaucratic and political networking" he said.
From then to now, it has been a long journey. Having traded the black safari suit for the kurta payjama, in the 1980s Singh faced betrayal from the Congress Party that promised him a seat from Madhya Pradesh. He joined the Samajwadi Party because he had something he could offer to the SP and SP had something it could give him. Mulayam Singh Yadav recognized the merit of a man who was content being the bridesmaid, never the bride. Consequently, he never interfered in Singh’s business plan for the party.
And Singh had many. As a politician, he was born at the cusp of the birth of India’s second generation economic reforms programme. That successive unstable governments came to rule India in the late 1990s in an environment of half-done reform afforded unique opportunities for leverage in government. Singh taught Yadav how to use this. From someone who was adept at getting his work done by babus, Singh graduated to someone who could now get babus to do his work.
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But his field of political operations continued to be Uttar Pradesh. When the Samajwadi Party came to power in UP, Singh launched with great enthusiasm and fanfare administrative structures that he said would change the face of Uttar Pradesh. To his credit he tried to modernize a moribund system by making it more corporate, more responsive. A UP Development Council, a system that was corporate-compatible, single window systems, revamping, privatization, all of these marked Singh’s initiatives, buzzwords that would later come to capture the nation’s imagination in the mouths of another leader who came from humbler origins.
But Singh’s best efforts failed to work. Too much else intervened: demands of day-to-day politics, UP’s existential contradictions, and the atypical UP politician’s inability to see beyond his nose. Again, there were many to take advantage of a measure only half done. It was Mulayam Yadav who, as chief minister, privatised 24 state-owned sugar mills in the state in 2003 but the issue was mired in controversy as all the mills were to be handed over to a particular industrial house which has now emerged as the largest sugar producer of the country.
Singh does not agree, but UP became a shambles because Mulayam Singh’s tenure started out as modern and visionary – with considerable credit due to Singh himself - but got bogged down in Yadav’s family politics and mismanagement.
Meanwhile, Singh expanded his network to include a galaxy of Bollywood stars. At one point, and multiple times later, Amitabh Bachchan would fondly refer to him as his ‘brother’; Singh was said to have played a key hand in helping Bachchan emerge from the bankruptcy of his production house ABCL.
Singh will no doubt dispute it vigorously but somewhere along the line, he, too, lost interest in modernising UP and contented himself, instead, with going with the flow. Ultimately, even that didn’t work.
Powerful poles of power in the Samajwadi Party, among them Azam Khan, Janeshwar Mishra and Beni Prasad Verma, began resenting his proximity to Yadav and his rise in national politics. It was Singh who through CPI M’s Harkishan Singh Surjeet introduced Mulayam Singh to Sonia Gandhi. The SP and the Congress shared an uneasy relationship until it snapped.
But winter was coming for Singh, too. His name cropped up prominently in the cash-for-votes scam, too, in which 3 BJP members of Parliament alleged they had been given cash to vote for the then UPA-led government in the India-IS nuclear deal. The CPI(M) had been supporting the Congress party, but was on the verge of pulling out over the Indo-US nuclear deal; around the same time, Singh was reported to have worked on a deal to get the SP to back the Congress’ initiative on the civil nuclear deal.
However, nothing was proven, but before long, Singh had a falling out with Mulayam Singh Yadav (as well as with Bachchan), and found himself in the political wilderness… until he got the Rajya Sabha seat. Now it is another political innings for Singh and the Rajya Sabha will likely be that much more interesting because of him.