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The Phone Battle(India Today Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Stardom or martyrdom. These are the two best ways to remain firmly in the crosshairs of public attention, and nobody knows this better than Amar Singh, who has elevated politics to a performance art. As he travels club class from state to state, building a republic of the disaffected, Mr Power Player has assigned himself a new role: that of the Maharani's victim. His ultimate goal: to become the Maharani's vanquisher by cobbling together a Third Front of Offended Parties, turning a personal issue into a moral one. What the Congress thought was a phoney war is now escalating into a real battle. Clearly, no one can possibly defend surveillance. By demonising the act, often the cheapest weapon in the arsenal of governance, Amar Singh has deflected attention from the contents of the tape, till now the subject of many sniggering asides in Congress circles. In its place, he has not only tapped into middle class fears of Big Brother watching them, but more importantly, revived a dormant alliance. It's not been easy. Even as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav held a press conference in Lucknow on December 30 to make UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi the hard target of allegations that Amar Singh's phones were being tapped, the man orchestrating the drama was busy working the phones, creating a network of unlikely, even disparate allies. The first one to speak up in his defence was CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat. He did not attack the Congress directly but urged a "proper investigation". Soon the cause seemed worthy enough for J. Jayalalithaa to join in, as Amar Singh called on her in Chennai. She, the ultimate empress of enforcement, likened it to the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon's presidency in the US. Two days later, Amar Singh caught another flight, this time straight to former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu's Jubilee Hills home in Hyderabad. Naidu endorsed Amar Singh's demand of an impartial probe by three chief ministers, Nitish Kumar, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Jayalalithaa. Then, in quick succession, interspersed with appropriately exaggerated fears expressed by Amar Singh in his whistlestop press conferences, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, BJP President Rajnath Singh, NDA convenor George Fernandes, and CPI General Secretary A. B. Bardhan joined the chorus. There were hiccups-most notably Bihar Chief Minister Kumar said sarcastically that he was "not so big a man" that his phone would be tapped-but Amar Singh succeeded in creating an air of unease, helped no doubt by subtle suggestions that his extended parivar was also being made to pay for proximity to him in what he calls a "concerted campaign". So even as income-tax officers asked actor Amitabh Bachchan for a pending instalment while he lay in ICU, a Congress functionary filed a writ petition questioning his protector/mentor Mulayam's "disproportionate assets". More than that, says Amar Singh, there is a sponsored propaganda that he is "working not for Mulayam Singh's politics but for his worldly pleasures, that he is under my spell, that his son Akhilesh is upset with me, and that he and his uncle Shivpal locked me in a room and bashed me". Sonia scion Rahul Gandhi has also spared no opportunity to rip into the Uttar Pradesh Government's "misrule", while the appointment of former Intelligence Bureau chief T.V. Rajeshwar as Uttar Pradesh Governor has not exactly gladdened the Samajwadi Party's (SP) heart. Once the Thakur Thronged, he has become the Citizen Wronged. The anger is controlled, the words carefully calibrated and the fear articulated to a posse of television cameras. Twenty NSUI goons protesting outside his official home in Lutyen's Delhi become 100 elephants sent to crush him underfoot. A tip-off from two Intelligence Bureau officials becomes Sonia's express order to find dirt on him. Memories of another day are evoked: the Congress, he says repeatedly, has a history of not tolerating dissent. "They want to blackmail me," he says. With what? Not sweet-talk with starlets, as is being insinuated, he says, but "private conversations with people close to me which they might not want to be made public" (see interview). As he traverses the spectrum from the Supreme Court, asking for a judicial probe into phone tapping, to the Delhi police commissioner, complaining his life is in danger, lost in the shadow boxing is the supreme irony: the mutual backbiting has not prevented either the Congress from supporting the Government in Uttar Pradesh or the SP from backing the UPA Government at the Centre. The politics of convenience adds a farcical touch to the morality play. So far, the UPA Government does not seem in any danger of being destabilised by all this huffing and puffing but there is an undeniable cross-party consensus on what the Congress initially thought was a bit of a laugh. The politician scorned is becoming the strategist reborn. The timing is significant: Uttar Pradesh elections are round the corner and the SP expects the Congress to suffer a series of reverses in forthcoming elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Pondicherry. Both Amar Singh and Mulayam expect their 38 MPs to matter more in a possible free-for-all-both to allies on the lookout for a new power magnet as well as to a potentially weakened Congress. But the Congress is in no mood to give the SP an inch. It believes the letters authorising the tapping, displayed by Mulayam at the Lucknow press conference, were forged-a claim Amar Singh has tried to pre-empt by saying he has information that the Delhi Police will blame him for master-minding the operation. The Congress counter-strategy is simple: convince Mulayam that Amar Singh is a liability for him, just as Amar Singh tries hard to keep alive the distinction between the constitutional authority (PMO) and the extra-constitutional power. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave him his word his phone was not being tapped, he says, even as he cluck-clucks at his helplessness. Amar Singh would like to paint his crusade in the colours of public service, but his politics has largely been personal. Especially on the Gandhis. Especially since he was transformed from the host with the most to 10 Janpath's most infamous gatecrasher. Overnight, on one May day in 2004, he, the man who prevented Sonia-despite her now legendary claim, "We have 272"-from becoming prime minister in 1999, became the man whom Sonia, made over by a divided mandate from loser to leader, put firmly in his place. That place, as he has discovered over 18 months of the UPA rule, is firmly with his nose pushed against the glass pane. On the outside, looking in. Irrelevant. Unnecessary. For a man who lives by the deal, there could be no worse position. The people of Uttar Pradesh may have made the SP the second largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha, but the arithmetic of coalition attached no value to it. The first to send a letter of support to the Congress-led Government, Amar Singh was also last in the list of Most Wanted. Thank you, he was told, but also no thank you, as he accompanied H.K.S. Surjeet to the UPA dinner at 10 Janpath, where Sonia clearly did not want to break bread with the eternal challenger. It is an insult that still rankles. He now finds he is unable to influence any decision at the Centre. As he exults in being invited to an all-party meeting with the prime minister on quotas in universities, he frets when he does not return his call. For, in the myth of Amar Singh, he is not just mofussil politician Mulayam's socially savvy man in Delhi, but also the stalwart able to co-opt national icons to the heartland, whether it is appointing industrialists to the Uttar Pradesh Development Council or making Amitabh Bachchan the state's brand ambassador. Keeping himself out of the messy internal politics of Uttar Pradesh (leaving it to Mulayam's sprawling clan and, therefore, removing any potential threat to their fiefdom), he has defined his role as the external affairs minister of the SP. Despite such a show of strength, the insider has become the outsider, unable even to get his twins into the tony Sanskriti School in Delhi (a failure he again ascribes to Sonia). The waiting room is exactly where Amar Singh's journey began, before he climbed his way out of anonymity, choosing friends well and discarding them wisely. Born in Aligarh to a family that ran Thunderlocks, a padlock shop, Amar Singh, one of three siblings, moved to Kolkata with his parents. His father had a shop in Kolkata's Burrabazar area, called Burman & Co, which sold building material. He studied in what he calls a "godforsaken" school called Khatri Vidyalaya. Three years of BA at St Xavier's College was the beginning of what he calls his "revenge on the anglicised, St Stephen's-educated, public school-background elite". It is a revenge he perhaps thought he had played out, having escaped the image trap of a social climber and become a dues-paying member of the smart set, with holidays in South Africa, chartered flights to Tirupati and flirtatious conversations with celebrity beauties. After all, what has he not done in his rough-knuckled ride? He arranged for Congressman Subrata Mukherjee's accommodation whenever he went to Delhi, escorted then minister of state in the Uttar Pradesh government, Vir Bahadur Singh, on his trips to Kolkata, ferried Diwali gifts for industrialist K.K. Birla, kept the late Madhavrao Scindia company on getaways to London, even accompanied a harried Bachchan to meet then prime minister Chandra Shekhar in 1991 when the Enforcement Directorate was investigating Bofors allegations. Amar Singh, who was inducted into the AICC from Madhya Pradesh by Scindia, has never let politics upset his career plans. It is not something he likes to publicise but he has been a Congressman longer than he has been a Lohiaite. He became member of the Chhatra Parishad, affiliated to the Congress, from Burrabazar in 1972. Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, now in the Trinamool Congress, remembers Amar Singh as a permanent fixture in Subrata's house. In 1972, Subrata became minister and Amar Singh became very active. Subrata, now Kolkata mayor, still credits Amar Singh for his contesting the state assembly elections from Burrabazar. "He made the Congress a strong force among the traders there," he says, adding they are now ideologically divided and therefore not in touch. For Amar Singh, the rise from a Ghaziabad chemicals factory owner in 1984 has been irresistible, far away from the days he spent trundling around Delhi in an Ambassador given to him by Birla. Having morphed from a political groupie to a friend of the famous and a collector of celebrities, he could pick fights with notables as assorted as Mani Shankar Aiyar and Shah Rukh Khan and turn them into long-running soaps. As he once said in a private conversation, always more colourful than his public-speak, "I have no shame in descending to the gutter when I'm fighting. I dare others to join me." He would be happy to discuss his closeness to the Ambanis, the Bachchans and to Sahara promoter Subrata Roy. He would also help people in trouble, picking up IOUs, whether it was speaking to former Mumbai police commissioner M.N. Singh when actor Sanjay Dutt's name cropped up in connection with the underworld on Bharat Shah's arrest, or sorting out Ajay Devgan's run-in with the Tamil Nadu government over wildlife violations during the shoot of Raju Chacha. His closeness to Roy helped, bailing out many filmmakers, from Rajkumar Santoshi to Boney Kapoor. Many of these favours have acquired the status of urban legends. The first principle in a dealmaker's book: power grows only if enough people know about it. The second: the more people know of it, the less difficult it is for them to say no to the next request. The third: wherever there is resistance, threaten retribution. But of late, the Teflon is wearing thin. There have been perceived slights, with the media splashing news of school children in Kanpur fainting while waiting for him to arrive in October 2005 and also questioning the payment of Rs 35 lakh to actor and MP Jayaprada by the Uttar Pradesh Government for a performance at Lucknow Mahotsav in December. To add to his woes, his younger brother Arvind Singh, who joined the Congress last month, has been announcing Amar Singh's demotion ("from MD of the SP, he has become director, finance"). For a man who was called upon by friends to sort out precisely such embarrassments, nothing could be worse. For Amar Singh has always been their storm trooper, the soldier who has gone out to fight, risking social injury, while they have remained above it all. He has also been able to play the great benefactor, whether it is getting industrialists Lalit Suri and Anil Ambani into the Rajya Sabha as independents with SP backing, offering emotional support to an Ambani encircled by his brother's ambitions, or giving a Rajya Sabha seat as well as the chair of the Uttar Pradesh Film Development Council to Jaya Bachchan. His non-judgemental loyalty to friends has not gone unrewarded. The Bachchans routinely speak up for him, while Ambani, the new chief of Reliance Infocomm, the phone company at the heart of the controversy, remains steadfastly with him. With their unswerving and still powerful backing, the master manipulator-turned-martyr is trying hard to keep in character. As he turns 50, his new goals, he claims, are to play with his twins, watch movies, spend time with friends and keep a "low profile". Good resolutions. If only they were true. -with Subhash Mishra and Swagata Sen BOX 1 AMAR KATHA Amar Singh's ascent is a study in the art of the possible: of making friends and winning influence 1956: Born in Aligarh, where his family owned a lock shop. His father then shifted to Kolkata where he ran a hardware store. 1972: Joined Chhatra Parishad, affiliated to the Congress. Attached himself to Subrata Mukherjee, then a minister in Siddhartha Shankar Ray's government in West Bengal. 1978: Moved to Lucknow, where he met former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh. Was introduced to industrialist K.K. Birla and worked for him as protocol officer. 1989: Met actor Jaya Bachchan when both were members of the Central Board of Film Certification. Began his high-profile association with the Bachchans. 1991: Proximity to the Birlas brought him in contact with Congress leader Madhavrao Scindia, who nominated him as AICC member. Scindia asked Rajiv Gandhi to give him a Lok Sabha ticket from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh. 1993: Mulayam Singh Yadav became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. As representative of the sugar lobby, Amar Singh built a rapport with him. 1996: Became Rajya Sabha member from Samajwadi Party. 1999: After the NDA government's fall, Sonia claimed support of 272 MPs. He persuaded Mulayam and Chandra Shekhar to opt for a non-Congress PM. 2002: Re-elected to the Rajya Sabha. 2004: Samajwadi Party won 38 seats but was kept out of the Government. BOX 2 RAP SHEET A government was toppled in 1991 on the privacy issue. Amar Singh is trying for a replay. APRIL 2005: Mulayam Singh Yadav makes a stray remark at a meeting in Lucknow that the Centre is tapping his phones and those of Amar Singh and his MP son Akhilesh. OCTOBER: In a statement in the Rajya Sabha, Amar Singh alleges his phones are being tapped. DECEMBER 30: Mulayam accuses Sonia Gandhi of ordering the tapping, says it is a conspiracy to topple his Government in Uttar Pradesh. Claiming to have heard the tape recordings, he says he is in possession of official letters ordering the tapping. The Delhi Police and the Congress deny involvement. The Union Home Ministry and the Delhi Police say documents are forged. But the Delhi Police arrest Bhupendra Kumar, owner of a Delhi-based detective agency, who reportedly tapped Amar Singh's phone for three months. He says he was working for a "mastermind". JANUARY 2, 2006: Kuldeep Singh, a Reliance Infocomm employee, is arrested for allegedly helping Bhupendra in the tapping. JANUARY 3: Mulayam accuses the UPA Government of cover-up and seeks a probe by the Special Task Force. JANUARY 5: Anurag Singh, owner of a detective agency who helped Bhupendra, is arrested in Delhi. Amar Singh meets J. Jayalalithaa, who says her phones are also being tapped. Lalu Prasad Yadav says tapes should be made public. JANUARY 6: The PMO denies role. Two days later, TDP's N. Chandrababu Naidu says his phone was also tapped. JANUARY 9: Amar Singh moves the Supreme Court for a probe. Alleges phones of K. Natwar Singh and apex court judges too were tapped. The BJP says L.K. Advani's phones were also under surveillance. Advani first backtracks but then agrees. Mulayam alleges there is a conspiracy to assassinate him. JANUARY 10: The Delhi Police rule out involvement of any government agency. The prime minister says it is shameful Sonia Gandhi's name is being dragged into the controversy. |