The Thakur in his maze

Neerja Chowdhury
First Published : 03 Feb 2010 12:27:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 03 Feb 2010 12:46:29 AM IST

Good or bad, fall guy or a one-man demolition squad, Amar Singh’s rise in politics was not only meteoric, in some way it represents the story of India’s changing politics. A man who used to hang around the corridors in the Lucknow secretariat in the Eighties managed to manipulate the system to emerge as the No. 2 in a party which has ruled Uttar Pradesh more than once, without being a member of the ruling family. Till he broke with Mulayam Singh Yadav, he had emerged as the most powerful figure after ‘Netaji’, the Samajwadi Party’s fund collector, general secretary, member of the parliamentary board, its spokesman and the party’s most visible face, pushing to the background old party loyalists.

He had become so powerful that if someone fell out of favour with him, he was shown the door. Senior leaders — like Beni Prasad Verma, Salim Sherwani, Azam Khan, Raj Babbar, Shahid Siddiqui — are believed to have left Mulayam’s side because of him. Partymen recall how in the past, a 50-vehicle cavalcade used to turn up to welcome Amar Singh when he went to Mulayam’s hometown Sefai for the annual Mahotsav, with Mulayam’s family in tow. Senior leaders and erstwhile socialists, like Janeshwar Mishra who died recently, used to chafe against Amar Singh’s growing clout but they could not prevail upon Mulayam to clip his wings.

The SP rebel has himself disclosed that he had offered to quit on three occasions. A few days before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, an aggrieved Amar Singh offered to step down at the meet of the party’s national executive. He was angry that his word was not heeded on ticket selection (Yet he managed to get a ticket for his protégé Jaya Prada despite opposition from founding member Azam Khan.) It was Amar Singh who persuaded his party to sever links with the Left and support the prime minister on the Indo-US nuclear deal. It was all very well for colleagues to talk big but he would be impressed if they managed to collect even 25 per cent of the money he raised for the party. As party leaders seethed, Mulayam defused the situation by reassuring him that the party wanted him to continue. Nobody dared oppose Mulayam. On another occasion, Mulayam is believed to have told him that he could take over as party chief, and the SP chief was a Lohiawadi, quite used to working without a position.

Mulayam tried to synthesise the growing contradictions in the party — a rustic rural background with the five-star culture that Amar Singh brought with him — but tensions between him and the Mulayam family came to a head after Firozabad. Firozabad was a defining moment for the party, and as Mulayam’s son Akhilesh Yadav put it, it represented much more than just ‘a setback’.

That Akhilesh’s wife and Mulayam’s daughter-in-law Dimple lost by a whopping 80,000 votes in Firozabad was even more galling because she lost to SP rebel Raj Babbar, in what has been a Mulayam fiefdom, a constituency from where Akhilesh had won only five months earlier. This pressed panic buttons in the party. And it emboldened Amar Singh’s opponents to join hands and strike, with Mulayam’s cousin Ram Gopal Yadav leading the charge.

Knowing what was at stake, within hours, Mulayam had snapped his ties with Kalyan Singh who was held responsible for the Muslims deserting the SP in the 2009 general elections and in the bypolls, and whose association with the SP was attributed to Amar Singh.

In a weakened party, with Mayawati and a Congress on the upswing, Mulayam was under tremendous pressure from his family and the party to call Amar Singh’s bluff and accept his resignation — which was what he finally did. Perturbed by the SPs poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections, and the more recent council elections in UP in which it managed only one out of 33 seat, with Mayawati cornering 31, Mulayam could not take chances.

There are many backroom boys in Indian politics today. Politicians — and parties — cannot do without them. They manage the system particularly now that politics is synonymous with big money.

Amar Singh’s success lay in his ability to get close to leaders. His proximity to former UP CM Veer Bahadur Singh and to the late Madhav Rao Scindia was well-known and in the Eighties he gravitated towards Mulayam. Mulayam was quick to see his usefulness and soon made himself indispensable.

It was said that the late Jayant Malhotra used to manage the funds of the then BSP chief Kanshi Ram but — he was given a Rajya Sabha seat — was dropped like a hot potato once he started to throw his weight around. K V P Ramachandra Rao, a powerful ‘soulmate’ of the late YSR — there used to be more cars outside his house than that of the CM— preferred to remain in the shadow.

Amar Singh loves the spotlight. The mistake he made was to try and become a frontline politician himself, as well as a backroom boy influencing the leader. This too in a party that is family-led. The ‘empire’ struck back. The real tussle in the SP was essentially for the No. 2 position, which the family did not want anyone else to corner.

With the party under attack in its post-Amar Singh phase, and faced with the challenge of redefining its identity, Mulayam is bending over backwards to show that there is no number two in the party. Moving with caution, he has not elevated Ram Gopal Yadav who remains general secretary or son Akhilesh, who is chief of the UP unit of the party. Instead, he has chosen to bring back the old socialists to the fore with Mohan Singh, a fellow thakur, replacing Amar Singh, and Brij Bhushan Tiwari as vice president. He knows he has to recapture the party’s earlier image and win back the support of the Muslims.

He also needs to keep his flock together, knowing that Amar Singh will strike where the party is vulnerable and the wily thakur has already attacked it for favouring family members, and for giving importance to those with a criminal record, like Ateeq Khan, D P Yadav and Mushtaq Ansari. On his own, Amar may not add up to much politically. But he will try and damage the SP by continuing to embarrass it, and the media will lap up his statements.

He may become a thorn in Mulayam’s side and already the Congress and the BSP are smiling. But neither Sonia Gandhi nor Mayawati seem to be in the mood to take Amar in their parties. Nor is the BJP. Even regional outfits like the NCP or the Trinamool Congress — even if they feel they could do with the Amar Singh type of skills — may fight shy of taking him, given his penchant for flying off the handle. He will ultimately be left with little option but to float his own outfit. The trouble is that a new party requires more than money to take off.