#dnaEdit: Raconteur Natwar

The kiss-and-tell political accounts are not many in India because many of the people involved in the making of those fateful decisions do not always have a sense of history. And they are not equipped with the wit and the charming turn of phrase that Natwar Singh, the Cambridge-educated and estranged Congressman, commands. Even if what he is narrating is not the whole truth, there is no denying the fact that his autobiography would make for pleasurable reading.

The most important thing that has spilled over into the media is his narration of Sonia Gandhi backing out from her claim to be Prime Minister after the 2004 election because son Rahul Gandhi was opposed to it. The question is: True or false? It looks like neither. It can be conjectured that the son must have expressed his fears, which were not really far-fetched, but it would be another thing to assert that this was indeed the reason for Sonia declining the ‘çrown’. Many of Sonia’s detractors would want to believe the snatch of Natwar’s revelation as a clinching factor to pummel the “inner voice” renunciation speech. Natwar must be aware that what he has written is historical trivia. It has its uses and its pleasures. It is engaging gossip in the best sense of the term.

What Natwar has to say about Sonia’s uppity attitude and her deep sense of insecurity, who kept herself surrounded by genuflecting lackeys and of having ignored wiser counsel of the kind that Natwar would have offered is indeed a gripe and nothing more. Natwar is not infallible in his judgments and he did bungle along with the rest of the government in handling the democratic upsurge in Nepal a decade ago. Manmohan Singh did not fully trust him as the right man to handle the emerging equation between India and the US which culminated in the India-US civil nuclear agreement because Natwar was seen as the outdated diplomat of the Nehruvian, non-alignment era.

It is true that he was made a scapegoat and forced to resign in the wake of the Vocker report about food-for-oil in Iraq scandal. The media hunted him mercilessly ignoring the scores of big corporations that were listed in the report as beneficiaries of the embezzlement in what was intended to be a UN-backed humanitarian mission. Through it all, Natwar held his head high and kept his nerve. And he did not become an entirely embittered man. Ever since he has gone into political exile of sorts, he has been recounting the many interesting facts from his interesting life including the Chandra Swamy-Margaret Thatcher encounter. And he has told us in one of his columns how he went to meet Shankar Dayal Sharma to request him on behalf of Sonia to be Prime Minister after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. With his new revelation about how Sonia did not become Prime Minister, he has shown that he was one of the men around when those important decisions were in the making.

Natwar is a raconteur par excellence and that is his forte. The Congress party could have done better than issuing official refutations. He is whetting our curiosity by giving out the tantalising snatches of information, and he knows that he has only snatches to offer. Natwar is history’s eavesdropper. We must say, thank you, to the old man, who is not as yet Coleridge’s ancient mariner. He is not buttonholing you. He knows what he has to tell is captivating.