He began as a “bijnesman”, entered the spotlight, landed in jail and now, he’s got Z category security. At 60, Amar Singh is a survivor extraordinaire and he’s living proof that politics is a wheeler-dealer’s game. 

Anyone who has observed his machinations through the years would not be surprised at the allegation that he was the man at the root of the prevailing crises in Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Yadav clan. And significantly, this is not the first time Singh has been seen as a culprit for dividing a family – after all, remember the Ambanis and the Bachchans? 

Amar Singh’s entry into the world of politics began with his chance meeting with the UP chief minister Veer Bahadur Singh in his capacity as a liaison man of a leading corporate house. Using his ‘thakur’ origin from the Azamgarh belt of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, he managed to develop his access with Veer

Bahadur Singh, who also hailed from the vibrant town of Gorakhpur in eastern UP. What transformed Amar Singh’s profile was meeting Mulayam Singh Yadav while the latter was doing his second stint as chief minister in the early 1990s. Mulayam gave Singh what he had perhaps not even dreamt of: political status not as just a Rajya Sabha member, but also as Samajwadi Party national general secretary by the mid-1990s. 

Evidently, that was Mulayam’s way of reciprocating for all the goodies he had received through a fixer in his mix. Basically a party of rustics, Amar Singh provided the Samajwadi Party’s with its first exposure to the dazzle of Bollywood and the glitter of the corporate world, which completely overwhelmed the diminutive wrestler-turned-skillful politician from the badlands of Etawah. 

And Mulayam never made any bones about it. This scribe distinctly remembers how he expressed his fascination for Amar Singh – “Kya baat hai Amar Singh mein! Unke ek phone pe bare-bare log yaha aa jate hain – jaise dekhiye – Amitabh Bachchan. Bara-bara udyogpati Bambai se Lucknow chala aata hai (What a man this Amar Singh is! One call from him brings megastar Amitabh Bachchan here. Big industrialists come to Lucknow from Mumbai)”. He went on to rattle out names of industry giants whom Amar Singh had involved with UP Development Council, created in the name of UP’s promotion in the country’s financial capital. This position came in handy for Amar Singh to flaunt his newly-acquired political status among leading industrialists and also to impress Mulayam with the clout he could display with corporate honchos.

No one knows whether the development council could serve its ostensible objective of promoting industrial development in UP or to raise UP’s profile in Mumbai. But it did help Amar Singh enhance his own profile, leading Mulayam to eat out of his palm. Impressed by Amar Singh’s gift of the gab, the SP supremo made him the party spokesman, sidelining party veterans like Beni Prasad Verma and Azam Khan. Even Raj Babbar, who had become a prominent face of SP, was reduced to a pygmy before Amar eventually compelled him to make an exit from the party. 

What gave Amar Singh further prominence in national politics was his push to the Samajwadi Party to support the UPA at a time of acute crisis in 2008, when the Left wing decided to walk away from United Progressive Alliance (UPA) over the nuclear deal. Thirty-nine members of SP supported the Congress and saved UPA from crumbling and a flamboyant Amar Singh promptly snatched all credit for these moments in the limelight. 

The importance given to him by Mulayam went to Singh’s head. Already used to meddling in matters of governance, it was his getting entangled in issues related to the allotment of prime commercial and industrial plots in the all-important NOIDA and Greater NOIDA that brought him into direct conflict with Mulayam’s close cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, who believed in having his own de facto control over what were considered UP’s biggest “milking cows”. 

By continuing to throw his weight around in an obvious bid to send the message to all and sundry that he was number two in the party, Amar Singh naturally invited the wrath of many including Ram Gopal Yadav, Azam Khan and even Akhilesh Yadav. Finding Amar Singh too big for his boots, they started raising their objections against his increasing interference. The common feeling was that Amar Singh had taken SP miles away from the Samajwad of Ram Manohar Lohia in whose name Mulayam would never tire of swearing. 

Meanwhile, Amar Singh was accused (and later even sent to jail) of bribing three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha MPs to vote for the UPA government that was facing a floor test in the parliament in 2008. This was followed by a phone-tapping controversy in which his conversations revealed how he allegedly fixed deals with politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats and Bollywood celebrities. A CD emerged showing him and Mulayam in conversation with India’s leading lawyer and former law minister Shanti Bhushan, discussing how many crores would it cost to “buy” a court verdict. What brought Amar Singh into further disrepute were his sleazy telephonic conversations with a popular Bollywood actress and negotiating lucrative deals with top UP bureaucrats and politicians. 

Known for having a finger in every pie, Singh was even accused by American author Peter Schweizer, in his book Clinton Cash (published in 2015), of donating a couple of million US dollars to the Clinton Foundation in 2008 when the American Congress was debating the much-talked about India-US nuclear deal, which India eventually signed. 

It was Akhilesh Yadav who finally succeeded in prevailing over his father to cast Singh out of the SP fold. Amar’s inglorious expulsion from the party for a period of six years spelt his political doom. After moving heaven and earth to seek entry into any other political outfit, he finally ventured into floating his own political party under the banner of Rashtriya Lok Manch, which turned out to be a total disaster. Each of the candidates he fielded on 360 of UP’s 403 state assembly seats in 2012 lost their deposits. This was followed by another misadventure in 2014, when he joined Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal along with his only protégé and former Bollywood star, Jayaprada. That too ended in a miserable defeat from the Fatehpur Sikri Lok Sabha seat where he lost his deposit. 

That left him with no option but to knock at the Samajwadi Party doors yet again. With his Rajya Sabha term coming to an end, desperation led him to use a vulnerable Shivpal Yadav this time. And that worked. According to an insider, Shivpal was assured of getting nephew Akhilesh’s chair if he (Shivpal) were to succeed in ensuring Amar Singh’s re-entry. 

No sooner was that deal struck, the wheeler-dealer was back and trouble started erupting in the Yadav family. Ultimately, it has sparked off a war between the father Mulayam and son Akhilesh. Being familiar with Mulayam’s frailties, it was not difficult for Amar Singh to not only win him over, but also ensure his own renomination to the Rajya Sabha despite opposition from Akhilesh, Ram Gopal and Azam Khan. Like any fixer, Amar Singh always believed in following the old dictum – ‘you give them an inch, they take a yard’. However, when he sought to extend his tentacles by getting a highly ill-reputed and corrupt IAS officer appointed as chief secretary and tried to push his way into Noida land allotments, Akhilesh put his foot down. Akhilesh, in an unusually assertive mode, made it loud and clear to Amar that enough was enough, but that only made the family feud worse. It was now patently obvious to everyone who was responsible for putting the Yadav clan in a boiling cauldron. 

Notwithstanding what shape the Yadav family feud finally takes, it was evident that at the end of the day, the incorrigible wheeler-dealer has had his way yet again.