When a top political aide of a veteran minister saw Nachiketa Kapur on television on Thursday, he was initially amused. “He used to frequent the Youth Congress office and sit at a corner for hours. He regularly sought exclusive appointments with the brass of the Youth Congress and National Students’ Union of India but never got any,” recalls the aide.
“In his early 20s, he was never as dynamic as it appears on Thursday in Wikileaks,” recalls another private secretary of a minister who had a stint with the Youth Congress during the 80s and early 90s.
No one is sure of his academic background, except that he was a student of Delhi Public School’s Mathura Road branch and had reached class XII. “But he was persistent and managed to find a place in the Foreign Affairs cell of the Congress,” said a former Congress worker.
During his stint in there, Kapur, a resident of Rajinder Nagar in Delhi, started developing contacts with foreign diplomats. He was also a friend of Satish Sharma’s daughter, Sharika. While Sharma has denied any links with Kapur, the latter has stated he never worked “formally” with Sharma.
Kapur has also vehemently denied all the allegations against him mentioned in the Wikileaks.
But Congress sources claim he indeed had ties with the organisation and when the United Progressive Alliance government came to power in 2004 and J N Dixit was made the National Security Advisor, Nachiketa Kapur found a place for himself in the National Security Council as a research officer.
After Dixit died, he lost interest in the National Security Council and started looking for greener pastures. During this time, tourism minister Renuka Chowdhury was looking for an aide and Kapur soon found a place in her office. Kapur regularly used to have bitter arguments with Chowdhury’s officers, despite becoming her trusted aide. And soon, he had to leave the job.
Also Read
After he resigned from the tourism minister’s office, he was named in a case in the Parliament Street police station on some missing computer files. Congress sources suggest some video clips were also missing from the personal computers in the office.
Kapur again came to the limelight when he was appointed Deputy Director General (protocol) for the Commonwealth Games by Suresh Kalmadi and his aides. But there, too, he didn’t survive for long, as others pointed fingers at the glaring neglect of standard rules and procedures in his appointment.