Former Congress MP Natwar Singh at Parliament on January 2, 2019. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
Former External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh, passed away on Saturday (August 11, 2024). He was 95 and was hospitalised for nearly two weeks in a clinic in Gurgaon, outside Delhi. Mr. Singh served as the External Affairs Minister in 2004-05 in the Cabinet of former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh of the UPA.
A prolific writer and chronicler, K. Natwar Singh started his career as an Indian Foreign Service Officer in 1953 and took early retirement in 1984 when he contested from Bharatpur in Rajasthan and became a Lok Sabha MP. He served as the Minister of State for Steel in the Rajiv Gandhi government and subsequently became the Minister of State for External Affairs in 1986. Apart from leading India’s multilateral campaigns at that time, he also participated in the Indian plans for bringing an “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned” government at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He visited Rome and tried to pursue Afghan King Zahir Shah in the spring of 1988.
Singh joined the IFS on April 14, 1953, at the age of 22 and was at the South Block and the districts where he served for the next four years. At that young age, he served as a liaison officer for multiple delegations from China, Egypt and Indonesia which gave him an impression of the working of the President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Dr. Mohammad Hatta of Indonesia.
He subsequently served in multiple Indian missions including in London, where he worked under Indian High Commissioner Vijay Lakshmi Pandit and was attached to the PMO under Indira Gandhi in 1966. He served in Indira Gandhi’s PMO till 1971, in Poland (1971-1973) as the Indian ambassador, and in the United Kingdom where he was the Deputy High Commissioner when the Emergency was imposed in 1975. He was India’s High Commissioner to Pakistan from 1982 to 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in her last stint and is known to have interacted with the ruler of Pakistan General Zia ul Haq during that time on multiple occasions conveying India’s discomfort about Pakistan’s policy on the insurgency in Punjab.
He was bestowed the second highest civilian award Padma Vibhushan after he served as the head of the preparatory committee of the non-alignment summit in New Delhi in 1983.
Singh had a spell of political exile after his former senior colleague P.V. Narasimha Rao took over as the Prime Minister of India after the 1991 election. He had serious differences with PM Rao and ultimately became one of the founders of the All India Indira Congress. He returned to power in 2004 when Dr. Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister of the UPA-1 government but had to resign after the Oil-for-Food scandal broke out which indicated that people close to him, including his son, had benefitted from the payments. Singh resigned in March 2006 in the backdrop of the oil for food controversy though he always maintained that he had not gained personally from the payments.
A prolific author, he also wrote several books including one on Jat ruler of Bharatpur Suraj Mal. He was a friend of Mulk Raj Anand, E.M. Forster and many other 20th-century literary giants. He wrote several volumes after leaving the office of the External Affairs Minister that recollected his diplomatic journey from India to Zambia, Ethiopia, China, U.K., U.S. and Pakistan.
He is survived by his son Jagat Singh, and his wife Heminder Kumari Singh. Former Chief Minister of Punjab Captain Amarinder Singh is his brother-in-law. His autobiography One Life is Not Enough was published in 2014. The book was launched in a packed event that was attended by several stalwarts including former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.
