Obituary: In written word, found anchor amid political storms

The death of K Natwar Singh (93) on Saturday night ends the journey of a man who meandered through diverse professions and situations, but will in the end be remembered for his abiding love for the written word that kept him centred during political upheavals.

Born in the royal family of Bharatpur in Rajasthan, Singh served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), resigned from the service midway, went on to become a Union Minister for External Affairs, only to be asked to leave unceremoniously in 2005 owing to his alleged role in the “oil-for-food” scam.

The contours of his political journey went from being a trusted friend of the Gandhi family to being a persona non grata in the Congress. Natwar Singh did not take kindly to his removal as the External Affairs Minister during the UPA-1 era, led by Manmohan Singh. A UN committee, headed by Paul Volcker, had found that Natwar Singh and some others were beneficiaries of ‘under-the-table’ payments in providing food to sanctions-hit Iraq in the early 2000s.

Manmohan Singh dropped Natwar Singh from the Cabinet in December 2005. A year later, the party suspended him after a report by Justice RS Pathak, commissioned by the government, was made public. Natwar Singh severed ties with the Congress in February 2008, ending a relationship spanning decades. When he resigned from the IFS in 1984, he contested the Lok Sabha elections from Bharatpur and went on to become a Minister of State for Steel and Coal, and later, MoS External Affairs in the Rajiv Gandhi Cabinet.

He announced his exit from the Congress in 2008 during a rally organised by the BJP. Later, he joined the Bahujan Samaj Party but parted ways with it, too.

During the PV Narasimha Rao era (1991-96), Natwar Singh was sidelined in the Congress. At one point, he, along with Arjun Singh and ND Tiwari, left the party to form the All-India Indira Congress (Tiwari). He returned to the party fold in 1998 and was seen as part of Sonia Gandhi’s coterie.

In his autobiography, ‘One Life is Not Enough’, released in August 2014, Singh divulged private conversations between Sonia Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh, whom he had publicly criticised multiple times. For him, that shut the Congress’ door forever.

A 1953-batch IFS officer, Natwar Singh had walked the diplomatic tightrope in the Cold War (1945-1991) era when he was part of the much-publicised Non-Aligned Movement summit in New Delhi in 1983. Next year, he was conferred the Padma Vibhushan. Natwar Singh studied at St Stephen’s College in Delhi before going to Cambridge. As a diplomat, he served as the Deputy High Commissioner for India in the UK from 1973-77 and was Indian Ambassador to Pakistan from 1980-82, when relations between the two neighbours were rather frosty. It was also a time of churn in the US-Pakistan ties as the US trained an army of mujahideen who took on the Soviets in Afghanistan. —Ajay Banerjee