K Natwar Singh, 93, diplomat and Congress loyalist who turned persona non grata, dies

Ajay Banerjee

New Delhi, August 11

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 while all the political storms blew around.

Born in the royal family of Bharatpur in Rajasthan, Singh served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, resigned from the service mid-way, became a Union minister for External Affairs only to be asked to leave unceremoniously in 2005 because of his role in the alleged “oil-for-food” scam that broke in 2005. 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 party.

Natwar Singh had not taken kindly to his removal as External Affairs Minister during the UPA-1 era led by Manmohan Singh over the scam. 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 cut ties with the Congress Party in February 2008, ending a relationship spanning decades. When he resigned from the IFS in 1984, he contested the Lok Sabha election from Bharatpur and went on to become a Minister of State for Steel and Coal and later held the External Affairs portfolio in the Rajiv Gandhi cabinet.

The parting from the Congress in 2008 was announced at a rally organised by the BJP. He joined the Bahujan Samaj Party before exiting from that too.

During the PV Narimsha 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 the coterie of people ‘close to Sonia Gandhi’.

In his autobiography ‘One Life Is Not Enough’ released in August 2014, Singh divulged private conversations between Sonia Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh, who he had publicly criticised multiple times.

A 1953 batch Indian Foreign Service officer, Natwar Singh had walked the diplomatic tight-rope in the Cold War (1945-1991) era when he was part of the 1983 organised and much-publicised Non-Aligned Movement summit in New Delhi. 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 Deputy High Commissioner for India in the UK from 1973-1977 and was Indian Ambassador to Pakistan from 1980 to 1982, 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 Soviet Army in Afghanistan.