WASHINGTON: It was during the Presidency of Ulysses Grant, the first prominent US politician to visit India (in 1878, after he demitted office), that the term lobbying entered the American lexicon. The story goes that Grant used to repair to Willard Hotel, next door to the White House, to relax with a cigar and brandy after a hard day's work. Political wheelers and dealers, fixers and nixers, hung around the hotel foyer, hoping to get a word across to him. Lobbying arrived in US, although the term existed across the pond. The word 'lobby' itself is thought to have originated in England from an old Germanic word meaning "leaf," to convey a shelter made of leaves and branches.
Today, Washington DC is the world capital of lobbying; a lobbyist's haven. Most lobbying enterprises are located just four blocks north of Willard on the city's "K Street," now seen as a derogatory metonym for influence peddling, much like Dalal Street in Mumbai and Wall Street in New York City are euphemisms for the financial world. Lobbying, a multi-billion dollar business, has attained a near industry status because it employs some 40,000 people directly (including nearly 20,000 registered lobbyists) and many more indirectly. So pervasive is lobbying in America that the two-mile long K Street has engendered an eponymous HBO TV series. Just to lobby the point one more time: There is even an American League of Lobbyists (ALL) which lobbies on behalf of the lobbying industry.
Into this world arrived Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai sometime in the early 1990s. In a city full of campaigns and causes, issues and interests, from advocacy groups for Armenia (once represented by Bob Dole) to lobbyists for Zambian and Zimbabwean mining interests, he became, over a period of two decades, the face of the ''Kashmir issue" in the US, shilling for the Pakistani viewpoint.
This was rather ironical because the Indian lobbyist for many years when he arrived in DC was a larger-than-life Kashmiri Pandit named Janki Ganju, a Nehru-Gandhi family friend. Ganju had represented New Delhi's interests in Washington DC through half-dozen US Presidents and some ten Indian ambassadors at that time. But he was a one-man act, operating largely from home. Ganju was on a modest retainer, something in the region of $ 100,000 I was told, but he made a decent fist of it. He passed away in May 1995 a few months after I arrived in DC, but in the couple of dinners he hosted at his unpretentious home in Van Ness (he was an ace Balti cook) lawmakers and administration officials (including the controversial Robin Raphel, seen then as anti-India and pro-Pakistan) turned up to nibble and natter.
Fai, by contrast, was quiet, conservative, but well-heeled, which was bit of a mystery because he was not technically employed by the Pakistani government or its embassy (we know only now from the FBI that he was bankrolled by ISI through phony Pakistani-American donations). He operated out of downtown office with American interns and hosted events in hotels and on Capitol Hill, and on occasions even ventured out of the U.S, once hosting a "Kashmir conference" in Montevideo, Uruguay of all places. He was a pleasant man, but he had shady written all over him.
This was at a time India was pretty marginal in the American scheme of things. Pakistan was looked upon as a great ally who had helped US win the Cold War, although things had begun to sour between them over nuclear sanctions and the F-16 episode. But the swishy Benazir Bhutto had come to power a second time, Clinton was mid way through his first term, and Raphel called the shots on South Asia. There was still a pro-Pakistan tilt in the corridors of power. Raphel had stirred a hornet's nest by questioning Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India. At one point, Fai even claimed to have received a letter from Bill Clinton expressing concern over the situation in Kashmir.
Ganju was soon pensioned off by then Ambassador Siddharth Shankar Ray in favor of Springer, Rafaelli, Spees and Smith, the first professional lobbying firm hired by India. The contract was for $ 600,000 annually (to represent the entire range of Indian interests), which was about the same amount Pakistan allegedly funneled to Fai to further its single-point Kashmir agenda. You do the math.
I had a just one encounter with Fai early on, and it did not go well. He lectured me on Kashmiri history and hectored me on the atrocities by Indian forces. With collegiate insouciance, I told him I've much to learn about the history of Kashmir, but he could start by telling me origin of the name Kashmir and Srinagar. He got the point, turned red in the face, changed the subject, and collared me on the plebiscite issue. I asked if he thought Pakistan would abide by the terms of the UN Resolution (which required withdrawal of its forces from *** and allowed India to keep minimum number of troops to maintain order). And would Pakistan be able to get back the areas of Kashmir it had ceded to China? And how about restoring the demographics of that time (ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri pundits was already underway), not to speak of the relative harmony that existed at that time? I was never invited to another Fai event.
I don't particularly share the current lynch mob perspective in India over the dozen or so eminence grise from India who attended Fai's gigs, and perhaps enjoyed his hospitality. You had to be daft not to realize that he peddled the Pakistani line on the Kashmir issue, but it would have required extraordinary acuity to discern he was an ISI stooge. He didn't have it written on him. Of course, he would never talk about the atrocities and miseries in ***, but hey, most Pakistanis and Kashmiri separatists those days believed Pakistan was paradise. For their ruling elites, and for Fai himself Kashmir was just a cash cow, to be used for extracting money from the world, their own people, and distract them from other pressing issues.
While Fai had a run of the pro-Pakistan Kashmir narrative with Ganju's departure (US lobbying firms weren't exactly wired into the issue), Kashmiri Pandits, few in number in the US, had no voice, much less the lolly required to drum up support. Most Pandits were salaried professionals. The little advocacy they did was voluntary, after-hours work. Except for an occasional lawmaker (like Frank Pallone) no one had the time of the day for them mainly because there was very little moolah they could put into a campaign kitty.
Just how important money and patronage is in the US lobbying industry is evident from an incident some few years back. When Vikram Pandit became CEO of CitiBank, there was a brief flurry of excitement among Kashmiri Pandits, who thought they'd finally have a mascot and money-spinner who could help their case. But the buzz subsided quickly when they found he was a Maharashtrian from Nagpur. Fai, meantime, was flying high even though he was already on the FBI radar.
don't speculate lets wait and watch 
