D Lal & Sons

With the trust vote as a backdrop, I am tempted to adapt one the most powerful lines uttered in Ram Gopal Verma's "Sarkar" by the chandraswami inspired Godman, - "Amar Singh ek insaan hai. Dalaali ek soch". Hence, to understand the phenomenon that is Amar Singh (and his ilk), it is important to internalize the concept of Power Broking. Before I proceed I must confess, I have enormous (though grudging) respect for Amar Singh. He is self-made, has achieved what he sought to in a very short span of time and in a profession where power is the end objective, he has defined a means of continually staying relevant. To gauge a man’s political stature simply by measuring the size of the electorate behind him is passé and in a fast maturing democracy like ours, voters are just one moving part of the overall engine. There is a place for mass leaders and likewise one for those who move and shake them in order to keep the political barometer stable.



The metamorphosis of the safari-clad hanger-on into the urbane deal-maker has been done to death. That is not what this post seeks to achieve. I attempt to explore and unravel the secrets behind their success given that their existence is not restricted to the political domain. Most management trainees in corporates get bullied by name-dropping, archaic distributors who know the corner office occupant from his hardship days. Journalistic circles have stories galore about some of their brethren having the ability to "manage" government corridors and most business houses have liaison specialists who revel in pressing the right buttons and not necessarily with dollars alone. So what is it that makes this breed tick?



1. Information is Power: I have never met Amar Singh but we once traversed a few floors together in a hotel elevator. The other occupants were a safari suited crony, the hotel attendant and the Head of State of an obscure country with his security detail. Mr Singh engaged in a rapidfire conversation with the attendant, enquired about the credentials of the dignitary, expressed surprise at the minimalist bandobast and also sought comparisons with the Clinton entourage. As we got off the elevator and he settled into the exclusive lounge with the head of a large PSU bank, I couldn't help admire the ease with which he struck a rapport with a social "unequal" and the comfort with which he slipped into schmoozing with a corporate chieftain minutes later. What did not escape me too was his insistence on gathering information albeit seemingly irrelevant. It is probably a sigma of several such titbits that add up to a potentially explosive armoury of facts. Examine most deal-makers closely and you will observe a startling attention to such details coupled with an elephantine memory.



2. Objective Emotion: In the days when the likes of Murli Deora and Rajni Patel stalked the corridors of power , affiliations were public but animosities were guardedly muted and at best, undercurrents were on public display. Pramod Mahajan broke the mould but even he often had the gloves on while throwing his punches. A Rajiv Shukla (or Rudy) on the other hand wear their supposed hates on their sleeve with dignity being thrown the wind when the game is in play. Defining these goalposts is an integral part of the battle strategy so as to ensure at least team formation for the immediate spat on hand is a little less complicated. A fierce exchange of adjectives (and the odd expletive), an embarrassing laundry of dirty linen and of course a steadfast refusal to capitulate on the grounds of pride and dignity is par for the the course till one step before end-game, at which stage objective considerations take over. The difference though is that an Ajit Singh or a Narayan Rane falter after a few weeks (or at best a month) but successful practitioners of the trade can shadow box for a few years before "realising" they wore the same uniform. In the ensuing period, rhetorical diatribe is raised to a point where the price of compromise for the player in need is astronomical. But in an era where a 180-degree turn from an "uncompromising position of principle" is fairly accepted (and in fact expected), tactical venom spitting is a winning strategy.

3. A Friend Indeed: Here one has to give it to the brokers. One cannot succeed in this profession unless one has really debited the favour bank for friends. It is unlikely that Amitabh Bachchan keeps Amar Singh's company because of a shared love for hindi poetry or Dhirubhai's legendary association with Murli Deora owed itself to a paucity of alternative congress connections. Most of us would help friends if it were no sweat off our backs but those with the relevant phone books would go that extra mile and seek a favour in turn to help those who they count as friends. A prominent Delhi-based journalist openly boasts that a record number of people would name him as the person they would try to reach if they were given one number to dial when caught in a crisis. It is tempting for cynics to attribute several of these connections to facilitating the oldest profession in the world but even if that were the case, the ability to subsequently honour Omerta is essential and praiseworthy. There need be no permanent enemies but it is essential to have a few all-weather friends.

4. No Pride to go before a fall: This enterprise is rather unforgiving on the way up. One has to stomach insults, gate-crash into parties , wait endlessly at office lobbies/living rooms and hope it will all add up in the long run. A senior government functionary told me several years ago how an instrumental power broker in the last trust vote had once landed uninvited to a do in his honour accompanied by a veteran Maharashtra politician. Not only was he comfortable doing so, he actually beamed proudly on being introduced as the biggest fixer in town. Moral of the story: if you have not inherited a powerful address book by birth, you have to keep pride aside while creating it. Secondly, one should never attempt to take moral high ground in public. In fact, it is the absence of stated principles that equip the power broker with the lethal stones to throw at the glass houses that everyone increasingly seems to reside in.

With the passage of time and with our populace displaying greater maturity, I expect some of the activities that D Lal & Sons engage in to be legitimized. That will rid them of some of the sleaze in their imagery and also compel society to be less contemptuous of them than it currently is. One has to admire each of the deal-makers for being self-made with no Gandhi/Abdullah/Pilot surname to back them. For it to be a level playing field, we need to have the new darling of parliament, Omar Abdullah daring to contest from Aska (a constituency in my home state from where the sitting BJD MP was bought). Step back and remove the names involved and one realises the nation owes several progressive developments like Abdul Kalam's Presidency (read the first 10 pages of P C Alexander's autobiography if you dont believe me) and the eventual clear passage of the nuclear deal to machinations by members of "The Firm".