 "Natwar Singh")
Singh, who fell out with the Gandhis when he had to quit the Manmohan Singh Cabinet in 2005, said in a televised interview with Karan Thapar on Headlines Today that Sonia and her daughter, Priyanka, visited him in May this year, after eight years of having kept little contact with him, and suggested he drop this incident from his memoirs.
Congress General Secretary (Communications) Ajay Maken termed Singh’s revelations “ridiculous”. “These days it has become fashionable to sensationalise the contents of a book with the sole aim of ensuring better sales and free publicity. This is yet another such exercise. Any comment on it will be futile,” he said.
A former diplomat, Singh served in the Indira Gandhi PMO and later joined the Congress and served as a minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet. In his memoirs, One Life is Not Enough: An Autobiography, to be released on Friday, Singh has made several revelations about the period from 1991 to 2005, including how after Rajiv’s assassination in 1991 it was not P V Narasimha Rao but Shanker Dayal Sharma who was Sonia’s choice as the next prime minister. It was only after Sharma, then vice-president of India, declined that Rao was approached on the advice of P N Haksar, another Gandhi family confidant.
But relations between Rao and Sonia were rarely smooth. He revealed details of clandestine meetings at Mohammad Younus’ home when Rao as PM appeared without security to seek Younus’ help in improving relations with Sonia.
Singh has also corroborated claims by Manmohan Singh’s media advisor, Sanjaya Baru, that Sonia had access to important government files, which advisor Pulok Chatterji would take to her. Baru had made the claim in his book ‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ earlier this year, a claim the Congress contested.
In the interview, Singh has talked at length about how he was made to quit the government in 2005 without being given an opportunity to present his case to Sonia. This was after the Volcker Committee, an UN investigation, named him and through him the Congress as beneficiaries of illegal payoffs in an Iraqi oil scam. Later, Singh was suspended from the Congress and eventually quit the party. He said while he had forgiven Sonia for the treatment meted to him, he did feel sad about those events.
About the political events of May 2004, Singh said he was part of a meeting where Manmohan Singh, Priyanka and Suman Dubey were present and where Rahul, or so they learnt, said he would take every step possible to prevent his mother from becoming PM and gave Sonia a deadline of 24 hours to decline. Singh said Rahul, who feared for his mother’s life, was “very adamant” about this.
Singh says Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad was angry when he heard Manmohan Singh would be prime minister, rather than Sonia. The Lok Janshakti Party’s Ram Vilas Paswan was also upset. It took a big effort to bring both men on board, he claims. At the Congress Working Committee, no leader said a word when Sonia announced Manmohan Singh as her choice. Manmohan Singh initially refused, saying he didn’t have the mandate, but was persuaded to accept.
Singh said Sonia and Priyanka called on him at his house on May 7 this year to plead that this story be kept out of the book. According to Singh, he told Sonia how government agencies like the Enforcement Directorate, Intelligence Bureau and others had investigated him all these years, and his phone was tapped.
Sonia, Singh claimed, said she was sorry and that she did not know. “It is not possible,” Singh claims to have told her. He said there was nothing in the Congress or in the government that took place without her knowledge. At this meeting, Singh claimed Sonia embraced him, she apologised for the way he had been treated and said he was her closest friend, in whom she had confided things she had never told either Rahul or Priyanka. According to Singh, Sonia once told him that there was no man in her life other than Rajiv.
Singh has described Sonia as “unapproachable”, “obsessively secretive” and “suspicious” in his autobiography, but says the traits are common to Indira and Rajiv and are part of the Indian tradition where the raja, or ruler, remains unapproachable. The former minister also said Sonia’s hold on the Congress was stronger than that of either Indira or Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira had to contend with the ‘Syndicate’, Nehru had stalwarts like Sardar Patel in his Cabinet. He has also described Sonia as a more astute politician than her husband, somebody who you cannot take liberties with, and said Rajiv was very “large-hearted”. He said Sonia monitored the decision-making in the government and that many knew about her having access to government files. Singh said this could not have been possible without Manmohan Singh’s consent, and that the question of protest by him or any other minister did not arise, as Sonia was the “most important person in the Congress party, period!”
Singh, along with son Jagat, joined the Bahujan Samaj Party briefly in 2008, but both were expelled for anti-party activities. Jagat is currently a BJP MLA from Rajasthan.
