Newsmaker: Karan Singh

Royal renunciator turns royal envoy

Dr Karan Singh was in Jammu, spending Baisakhi among his people, when his New Delhi home, Mansarovar in the upscale Chanakya Puri area, was besieged with telephone calls. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) wanted his coordinates, and immediately too.

There was a reason for the urgency. The situation in Nepal was fast descending into chaos, and civil war could not be ruled out. The official Indian establishment could not any longer stand by and hope for the best. Worse, former Foreign Minister and opposition leader Jaswant Singh had been in touch with King Gyanendra and had every intention of visiting Kathmandu at the earliest to intercede with the King.

If there was anyone whose advice the King was likely to heed, it was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The government had to wrest back diplomatic control over Nepal.

The government needed a name and a face that would strike a chord with King Gyanendra. It chose Karan Singh for the job. He was requested to return to the capital immediately "" which he did on 17 April, 2006. He was briefed by Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, and had a meeting with the Prime Minister. He left for Kathmandu on 19 April, 2006.

He had experience. He had pedigree. This was the man who had elected to join politics as a commoner, though he was elected Sadr-e Riyasat to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and later appointed Governor till he was called to the center in 1967 by Indira Gandhi as Tourism Minister. Gandhi and Singh were on the same political side through the dissolution of the royal privy purses (Karan Singh put his entire fortune in a trust called the Hari-Tara Trust, named after his parents).

But the hectoring tactics of Sanjay Gandhi irked several Congress gentleman-politicians "" IK Gujral was one and Karan Singh was another "" and even before the Emergency was announced, Singh had resigned from the government as Health Minister. Not surprisingly, he was one of the few former ministers to win in the 1977 elections (from Udhampur), and he deposed before the Shah Commission "" which is how the world came to know what Sanjay Gandhi was really up to during that phase, especially the forced vasectomies.

The Janata experiment collapsed in 1978, and Karan Singh opted to go with Charan Singh as his Education Minister, a period he would rather forget. He won the 1980 elections, but lost in 1984. In 1989, the Congress lost the election and a coalition appointed him Ambassador to the US. When the Chandrashekhar government fell, Singh resigned from ambassadorship and returned home. Since then, in his capacity as the Chairman of the Auroville Foundation, he has had the rank of a cabinet minister but has kept a low profile.

With the departure of K Natwar Singh from the Foreign Office and the AICC Foreign Cell, it has been his job to advise Sonia Gandhi on foreign policy. He was seen accompanying Gandhi at at least two recent meeting with heads of state "" the French President Jacques Chirac and the President of Cyprus, recently. His name was in currency as Foreign Minister, but now he might have the choice of two jobs: the foreign ministership and the one he would infinitely prefer, the President of India.

But can Karan Singh persuade the King of Nepal to see reason? It is hard to say. Although family ties are important "" Karan Singh's wife is the grand-daughter of the last Rana Prime Minister of Nepal "" Karan Singh comes from a family that renounced monarchy, and is likely to tell the King he should accede to the demands of the times. Nepal's political parties want the King to announce elections to a new constituent assembly that will set up institutional barriers between the King and the control of the Royal Nepal Army (RNA). The King is unlikely to agree to this.

Whatever the turn of events in Nepal, Karan Singh is currently on a ladder going up, though snakes abound in the Congress, some of them hissing at his feet.