The once all powerful Amar Singh dies a lonely death
the 1980s). The socialist met the socialite and learnt that party was both a noun and a verb. The rest of Mulayam’s party watched in dismay—this included son Akhilesh—as the SP neta became a regular fixture at Amar Singh’s over the top bashes. One comes to mind, a gala affair at the Ashoka Hotel (during the United Front government) that was thrown to celebrate the launch of his friend’s Sahara India TV and also Kerry Packer’s venture capitalist firm. From elephants to BMWS, all were made their way up the driveway, as did Ambani junior, Amitabh Bachchan and other Bollywood notables, the entire Parliament of Delhi including the then Congress president, Sitaram Kesri. It was also a statement that Amar Singh had arrived.
As Kaveree Bamzai, political columnist, points out, “No one straddled the worlds of politics, entertainment and big business like him. As India liberalised and its leaders struggled to acquire sophistication, he realised his unique niche in making the powerful comfortable with themselves, and overcome their social awkwardness with wordy bluster that put them at ease—whether it was Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Ambani or Mulayam Singh Yadav. He was their sharpshooter, their advisor, their organiser, their connector.”
But all good times come to an end and it was the “cash for votes” scandal that did him in. This was in 2008, when the BJP accused the Congress of “buying” 22 MPS to survive a no-confidence vote in Parliament. This was essentially a sting operation carried out by the BJP to trap the Congress and Amar Singh got caught on tape. He eventually went to prison for this and this was when most of his friends dropped him.
I caught up with him soon after, in 2010. He told me then, “Normally, people do politics for name, fame and money. I have had my share of all three. Perceptionally, I am at the lowest ebb of my sociopolitical graph but it is still much higher than from where I started.” And then added, “Success has many fathers but failure is a bastard. Today I am perceived to be a failure. Tomorrow, when I am settled, it will be different,” he shrugged. And then added philosophically, “For dawn to come, the dark night is essential because that is what shows who your real friends are and who are the weathercocks.”
By now Mulayam Singh Yadav
had been persuaded by a rival camp in the Sp—led by his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav and son Akhilesh—to dump Amar Singh. The Bachchans too had fallen out with him as had Anil Ambani and Sahara Shree. The much waited for dawn never came, though he kept reinventing himself: first he tried to float a Thakur-based caste outfit to fight elections in Uttar Pradesh, but that came a cropper. And during the last phase of his life, he moved across the political divide, sending out feelers to the Narendra Modi-led BJP. One of my last interviews with him had him defending demonetisation, and attacking Amitabh Bachchan. For one thing was a given, no matter what the topic of the interview, Amar Singh was sure to bring up the Bachchans.
He wore his bitterness on his sleeve and gave me a rather candid interview for Newsx in 2013, as he sat all alone in his posh bungalow in Lutyens Delhi. First he talked about Anil Ambani and said, “He was very close to me. Before I was arrested in the cash-for-vote, every Wednesday he used to come and have dinner with me and play with my daughters, he called them Princesses. He used to come to Delhi specially to have dinner with me. But when I was in jail there was no friend to furnish my bail bond of Rs 2.5 crore.” Then of course we talked about the Bachchans: “But these so called high and mighty including Mr Bachchan, whom I have helped in rainy days, were missing. I don’t want to sound arrogant and pompous but he himself has said this. He has said that had Amar Singh not been there I would have been driving a taxi.
But such reactions are only to get good PR and show he is grateful since everyone knows what I did for him.”
At one point he had tried his hand at Bollywood and shot a film with Dimple Kapadia called Bombay Mittai, where he played the role of a singer who gets murdered. He told me later, “I died so beautifully in that film”.
Real life was not as beautiful. Finally, from his deathbed in Singapore, Amar Singh did reach out to Amitabh in an emotional video. But the much sought for reunion did not happen—at least not as publicly as the outreach. In the end, the 64-year-old Amar Singh was all alone. He shot to fame as the man who had many powerful friends. He died as the man who had lost many powerful friends.