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Amar Chitra Katha
You cannot help feeling a little sorry for Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh as he scurries from city to city, writes Rajdeep Sardesai.
You cannot help feeling a little sorry for Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh as he scurries from city to city, from one TV channel to another crying hoarse that his phone is being tapped. Gone is the ready wit, the easy swagger and the broad grin that is part of the Amar Singh persona. Sure, the combativeness hasn’t entirely disappeared, but somehow one senses the flamboyance that made Singh Uttar Pradesh’s first Page 3 neta has been replaced by a more subdued politician, aware that time may be running out for him.
Contrast the Amar Singh of today with the man who dreamt of being at the heart of Indian politics only 20 months ago. We were following him on the election trail in the 2004 general elections when we asked him about the role of the Samajwadi Party in the post-election scenario. Eyes twinkling with anticipation, he gave a toothy grin, “Boss, just wait till the counting day. Then, you will know who is the kingmaker!”
Today, Amar Singh resembles a tragic caricature of what he had hoped to be: less a kingmaker, more a Don Quixote-like figure tilting at the windmills, real and imaginary.
Ironically, counting day in 2004 went perfectly according to plan. The Samajwadi Party won a remarkable 40 seats in the Lok Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. In a fractured Parliament, those seats should have been enough for Singh and his ‘real boss’, Mulayam Singh Yadav, to call the shots. But a bit like the groom who arrives with the baaraat only to find the bride missing, Singh found that the big prize on the journey from Lucknow to Delhi was suddenly hijacked by the Congress. The very Congress whose leader Sonia Gandhi had been dismissed by the Samajwadi Party as a ‘videshi mahila’ who was not fit to be prime minister of the country. Actually, it wasn’t so much the Congress who spoilt Amar Singh’s party as much as the comrades from the Left.
The Left’s spectacular performance in states like Kerala and West Bengal meant that the Congress did not need to ride on the Mulayam-Amar Singh bandwagon. The final ‘insult’? Amar Singh being snubbed at a dinner organised for the new allies of the Congress. Like so many politicians, Singh can live with both celebration and criticism. What he cannot endure is rank indifference. Twenty months later, Amar Singh is still having to come to terms with the reality of having lost out in the Delhi durbar, and now being the target of a hostile state machinery.
In the isolation of Amar Singh though, there is a bigger lesson for new age politicians. In many ways, Amar Singh typifies the ‘corporatisation’ of the contemporary politician: netas who climb up the political ladder more by networking and monetary clout and less through mass appeal and charisma.
‘Networking’ is a strange word in the lexicon of Indian politics. To some, it is synonymous with sleazy wheeling and dealing. But it’s actually much more than that. It’s the ability to influence (or intimidate) people, win friends or warn enemies, and generally broaden one’s sphere of influence. Just take a walk through Parliament, or indeed through any political party hierarchy and you will find a fair sprinkling of politicians whose rise can be attributed primarily to their ability to connect the world of corporate India with the realities of mass politics.
Amar Singh has been a master of the game, bringing politics (Mulayam), big business (Subroto Roy, Sahara and Anil Ambani) and glamour (Amitabh, Aishwarya and God knows who else) on one platform. You almost have a sneaking admiration for someone who can be having a power breakfast with Anil Ambani in the morning, will be out in the midday sun in Sonbhadra addressing a Thakur samaj rally, and then have a night out with Bollywood stars. It requires loads of energy quite apart from having a chameleon-like quality to switch clothes and companions with consummate ease.
It’s also true that politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav are, at the end of the day, a little more than regional satraps, familiar with the arithmetic of caste alliances, but a little out of place in the metropolitan drawing rooms where political deals are now increasingly struck. A Mulayam Singh needed an Amar Singh to force him to look beyond the boondocks of Etawah. As a Hindi-speaking neta more comfortable in a political akhara, Mulayam needed a more articulate spokesperson who could provide him an entry into the more influential English-speaking corridors of power.
A street-smart, relatively urbane Amar Singh was the perfect foil for the rustic vote-catcher Mulayam. This is a phenomenon that is now spreading across political parties, especially the regional groupings. A Sharad Pawar, to a more limited extent, needed the suave skills of another English-speaking businessman turned politician, Praful Patel, to ‘transform’ himself into more than just another sugar baron, and give the Nationalist Congress Party a more ‘trendy’ image. Even a Lalu Yadav is dependent on a Haryana businessman like Premchand Gupta to bankroll the RJD, and make it seem less like a party of rural folk. It’s an incestuous, mutually advantageous relationship: the mass politician delivers the votes, the ‘corporate’ politician delivers the benefits of being connected to the world of big business.
And yet, there are limits to this ‘strategic’ partnership as Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh are now finding out to their cost. It’s one thing to have a power-packed dinner for former US President Bill Clinton in Lucknow in the belief that this will transform UP’s image. But what can an ex-president’s visit really do for the power crisis in the state capital? You can get Jayaprada to dance to your tune at the taxpayers expense, but how do you reconcile entertainment value with the fact that little children are dying of encephalitis because of the appalling health facilities in eastern UP?
You can build an airport in Safai, Mulayam’s home town, but who will actually take the plane journey into the backwaters of UP, and what of the flagrant violation of environmental norms in the construction that has seen the gradual disappearance of the sarus crane, UP’s state bird?
And for how long will the posse of securitymen be seen as a status symbol when the law and order situation remains threatening for the man on the street? Nor can the image of being a ‘protector’ of Muslims be sustained by projecting political dons like Mukhtar Ansari and irresponsible ministers like Yaqoob Qureshi as the community’s representatives even while a majority of UP Muslims remain mired in poverty and backwardness.
In the final analysis, it’s the dissonance between image and reality that can trip the best of politicians. You cannot claim to be a ‘Samajwadi’ party and then practise a brand of politics that appears increasingly remote from the common concerns of the people who vote you in.
While it would be premature to write off the Mulayam-Amar duo given the party’s well-entrenched electoral network, (the SP did remarkably well in the recent local elections while the Congress drew a blank), it’s clear that ‘corporatised’ politics is subject to the law of diminishing returns if the benefits are monopolised by a handful. Amar Singh may well have good reason to feel victimised by the Centre, but he would also do well to remember that ‘victims’ don’t change their luxury cars every few months.
The writer is Editor-in-Chief, CNN-IBN.sardesai.rajdeep@gmail.com
