Monsoon Divorce

Sanjay Kapoor, Hardnews, New Delhi:
In 2004, as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was being cobbled up to stop the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from coming to power, Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Amar Singh finagled a visit to 10 Janpath, New Delhi, home of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, by tagging along with communist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet. He, however, was brusquely told by the hosts that he was not welcome.

At that time, the Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, was trying to show the world that it would have nothing to do with the wheeling-dealing ways of Amar Singh and his powerful friends that included industrialists Anil Ambani, ‘Saharashri' Subrato Roy and Amitabh Bachchan. For Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, it also meant they could conduct their affairs without having to compromise their integrity by cutting deals with hucksters.

The solid support of 60 odd MPs belonging to the Left Front meant that the Congress-led UPA did not have to scrounge for support from political mercenaries. "The Left parties allowed us to function without really asking for too many favours. I don't know how it would have been if the SP was with us instead," a Union minister once told .

Although the Left parties did not have any compunction about dealing with Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, it was Sonia Gandhi who was guiding the moral compass of her party and the coalition. She found the needle pointing away from them. She did not trust the SP duo as her attempt to form the government in 1999 was humiliatingly shortchanged due to their playing footsie with the BJP. But all this was in 2004, when there was not a whisper about the Indo-US strategic agreement or civilian nuclear deal.

In 2008, the circle has turned round. The reticent UPA chairperson, who in the past, used to shy away from dealing publicly with those people whom she found morally repugnant, was actually seeking out SP. The Congress under Sonia Gandhi had grown up. What was considered moral was being sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

On May 22, 2008, at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's official residence when the UPA was celebrating four years of its rule, a special invite was sent to Amar Singh. It was in some way a public atonement by the Congress leadership to the shoddy treatment that was meted out to him in 2004. The meeting was choreographed to ensure that the voluble media-seeking SP leader grabs all the attention so that his hyper-sensitive ego is amply irrigated.

At that time it became apparent that the Congress leadership was desperate to seek his ample abilities to stitch together a consensus over the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal -- a ticklish issue on which the rupture between the Congress and Left was building up. Amar Singh's visit to US, ostensibly on a holiday, became an occasion to connect with the new democratic leadership as well as key players of the energy lobby. Amar Singh, who has been close to Hillary (and Bill) Clinton through his US-based hotelier friend, Sant Singh Chatwal, was keen to seek friends who have been working with democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Unconfirmed sources also hint at his meetings with some officials of Halliburton, a company closely linked to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Bechtel and Halliburton were key, controversial oil companies who were in the thick of the bloody US occupation of Iraq.