Last
month, the Indian Foreign Office changed its lobbying
firm, Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand,
and named another public relations giant, Akin, Gump,
Strauss, Hauer and Field as its new lobbyist in United
States. The dumping of Verner had been expected for some
time after the change of guard at the White House and
the rise to power of the Republicans under George W
Bush. Both Verner and Akin are public relations
giants, with connections going to the highest levels of
the US political establishment, and that is saying
something in Washington, which is one heck of an arena
for contending influence peddlers and would-be power
players. According to one series of statistics, some
70,000 people are employed influencing or monitoring
government actions in the capital. Among themselves,
this brigade of influence-peddlers mops up annually
about US$8 billion, if not more. The term lobbyist
includes individuals - the lone wolves - as well as
those who work in lobbying for law and public relations
firms.
The lobbying game
Foreign
nations such as India pick their lobbying firm with an
eye to extracting maximum advantage in the areas of
foreign aid and trade matters, including intellectual
property rights. But whatever it is they want, the
lobbying firms in Washington help their clients get it
from the US legislature, the executive branch and the
bureaucracy - from a trade concession to more aid, or
help in dealing with another country. For instance, the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
studded with big-name Jewish politicians, diplomats and
lawyers, is one of the pre-eminent foreign-policy
lobbying groups. The two main items on AIPAC's current
legislative agenda are foreign aid - Israel receives
close to $5 billion in US aid annually - and passage of
the Iran sanctions bill.
Lobbying firms are also
expected to deflect criticism against their client
country, if and when the US Congress takes note,
concerning violations of human rights or infraction of
trade regulations and the like. Congressional
indignation, after all, may lead to partial or total
economic and financial sanctions.
The large and
powerful lobbying firms such as Verner and Akin do these
chores at the cost of a tidy annual financial contract
often exceeding $50,000 per month. To get clients, the
lobbying firms have their big guns working overtime in
consort with the politicians who can wield influence on
the people in power. For a foreign nation such as India,
it is considered beneficial to have a powerful big gun,
or big gun's company, on the payroll. That would provide
India, for instance, some sense of security - a comfort
blanket for a price - in dealing with the anti-India
lobby within the US. The PR firm guides India's
policymakers on how to deal with adverse forces in the
US and how to maximize the benefit from those who are
willing to consider India a "friend".
In
Washington, power players do have party affiliations,
but such affiliations do not put them in exclusive
corners. In fact, firms such as Akin have on their
rosters lawyers from both the Democratic and Republican
parties. Still, power players change with the changing
of the guard at the White House, and countries change
lobbying firms in sync. The latest change by the Indian
Foreign Office is in accordance with the unwritten rules
of the PR game.
Clinton's people
The
two "stars" that lit up India's lobbying efforts in past
years were former senator Robert Dole
(Republican-Kansas) and former Brooklyn congressman
Stephen Solarz (Democrat-New York). Solarz, an important
pillar of the Israeli lobby and once a powerful
congressman, helped facilitate India's rapprochement
with Israel. Solarz is a showman who went to the extent
of putting on a sleeveless jacket - popularized by
India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and since
called the "Jawahar coat" in India - and calling himself
the "congressman from Bombay". But those were the old
days. Neither Solarz nor Dole has much to offer
politically in Washington any longer. Some claim that
Dole did not do much lobbying for India anyway, while
the last time Solarz was heard of he was having a
problem holding his liquor at a party.
But Dole,
a Republican presidential contender and the former
Senate minority leader, was not the only power player
who acted as a lure for India to hire Verner in 1998.
President Bill Clinton's former treasury secretary Lloyd
Bentsen, former Texas governor Ann Richards (another
Clintonite) and former Senate majority leader George J
Mitchell all were on the Verner roster and helped the
firm, at least indirectly, to get prized contracts. In
fact, Verner, founded in 1960, has deep roots in the
Democratic Party and is definitely not a favorite with
Republican presidents. One of its partners, McPherson,
was White House counsel to president Lyndon Baines
Johnson. Another partner of the firm and a former
assistant secretary of state, Bert Bernhard, who
directed Maine Democratic senator Edmund Muskie's failed
1972 presidential campaign, served as special advisor to
secretary of state Dean Rusk during the Johnson
presidency.
Yet another important insider at
Verner is Leonard Garment, an AIPAC member and a
wheeler-dealer within Washington's powerful Israeli
lobby. Garment was a counsel with Richard Nixon's White
House and he also provided legal assistance to Clinton
in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Garment has another
asterisk beside his name: he was hired by Mark Rich, the
billionaire criminal living in exile in Switzerland for
almost 20 years who was pardoned by the departing
Clinton as his last act of clemency. Rich is also
acknowledged to be a major financier of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's Likud Party in Israel.
The
Akin, Gump stable
Given the strong presence of
the Israeli lobby at Verner, one might be tempted to
conclude that by dumping Solarz and Verner, the Indian
Foreign Office is loosening its close ties with the
Israeli lobby. However, things are not so simple. The
new firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, has its own Israel reps
and Clinton men: first and foremost is Vernon Jordan,
now chairman of the Wall Street firm, Lazard Freres, and
Bob Strauss, former US ambassador to Russia and former
chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Jordan, surely one of the most powerful
African-Americans in the US today, was brought into Akin
by Bob Strauss in 1982, and later became one of
Clinton's closest friends. Strauss entertains Democratic
presidents the way another power broker, Clark Clifford,
used to. Strauss is also a very "good friend" of Israel.
While Jordan is a member of the secretive economic power
grouping, the Bilderberg Society, Strauss is a power
broker and a strong pro-Israel voice within the
Democratic Party, a sort of backroom Joe Lieberman.
On the other hand, Akin also has a very
important friend of the Bush family on its roster: that
is James C Langdon, a lawyer. He is based in Washington
and a crystal ball is not necessary to figure out that
he played some role in the Indian Foreign Office's
decision to change its lobbying firm. According to Ken
Silverstein, an investigative reporter based in
Washington, the Akin firm is well connected to the
Republican Party. Nine officials from the lobbying shop
served as members of the Bush administration's
Transition Advisory Teams, including Bill Paxon, the
former congressman from New York, who remains close to
the House Republican leadership.
Also noteworthy
is that Akin is close to Saudi Arabia. Maybe this has
something to do with the closeness of former president
George H W Bush and his associates to the Saudis. Saudi
Arabia is one of Akin's clients, and the firm handles
many other rich Arab clients as well. Recently, Akin was
found lobbying on behalf of Glossco Freezone, a business
on the Caribbean island of Aruba controlled by the
Mansur family, some of whose members were indicted in
the US on charges of conspiracy to launder
drug-trafficking proceeds, a Washington Post report
stated in 1999.
The bad and the ugly
To move a titch away from the Clinton people to
get a tad closer to the powers-that-be is, no doubt,
appropriate action under prevailing circumstances in
Washington. In addition, Verner did have something of an
image problem in India. Most embarrassing for the
Indians were allegations of Verner's links to Warren
Anderson, the chief executive officer of Union Carbide.
Union Carbide was found guilty by the Indian courts for
the leak that killed thousands in the city of Bhopal on
a cold winter night in 1984. India's Lok Sabha (the
lower house of parliament) had questioned the Ministry
of External Affairs as to why it did not file even a
request with the US State Department for Anderson's
extradition. One answer that makes the rounds is that
Verner had advised the Indian Embassy in Washington not
do so because there was no published precedent for
extraditing a corporate official. That did not sit well
with many in India.
This is not to imply that the
Akin group has stayed away from controversial
associations. Founded in 1945, it is the 10th-largest
law firm in the US and has a great deal of interest in
"improving mineral-extraction methods in the Central
Asian nations and China, developing port facilities in
Central America, building a global satellite network and
investing in virtually every emerging market", as one
analyst put it.
What might bother some Indians
the most is the Akin group's links to Enron. It is
widely known that Clinton's commerce secretary, the late
Ron Brown, accompanied Enron chairman Kenneth Lay to
India. Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin listed
Enron as one of the firms with which he had had
significant contact while at Goldman Sachs. Enron was
represented by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss,
Hauer & Field, the firm where Clinton advisors Bob
Strauss and Vernon Jordan worked. Enron was accused in
India of bribing a large number of Indian politicians,
particularly those in the state of Maharashtra. Not a
few would like to point fingers at Akin for allegedly
helping Enron adopt these unethical measures to bag the
lucrative Dabhol contract.