The Hindu Business Line : Lessons from <I>l'affaire</I> Natwar Singh

The sooner Mr Natwar Singh sheds his hubris which has brought him to this pass the better will he be able to salvage what little political respectability he still thinks he can lay claim to.

The former External Affairs Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, who also enjoyed the enviable distinction of being the confidant of the Nehru-Gandhi family — held to be par excellence and nonpareil by the Congress Party faithful — for more than two decades has hit the worst patch of his life, recalling a medley of metaphors: End of the road, point of no return, fading into the enveloping gloom of a desert in a sandstorm, falling star...

Has Destiny dealt with him unkindly? Not a whit. He has brought on himself all the traumatic travails through which he is passing, by assiduously playing all the cards as wrongly as he possibly can at every turn of the game even on occasions favourable to himself. Every bit of it is of his own making and seeking.

Arctic cold

How did he — a former officer of the coveted and elite Indian Foreign Service, sharp-witted and savvy — manage to land himself in the Arctic cold of isolation and alienation, pathetically begging for being bailed out by parties which in times of yore he would have regarded as unbecoming company?

His predicament, though, does not lack parallels. There have been similarly highly placed personages who had tasted power and authority and were the toast of high society and who, caught in a compromising situation, enmeshed themselves in semantic subterfuges and `terminological inexactitudes' and sank deeper and deeper into quicksand in full view of the public. The Chinese proverb, "Those whom Gods want to destroy, They first make mad," applies to all of them. The course of history may have been different if only they had come clean at the very first sign of the thunderstorm gathering over their heads.

Suppose had the then US President, Richard Nixon, issued a forthright statement on the morrow of the startling news on Watergate break-in appearing in the press: "The unfortunate incident occurred due to my over-zealousness to find out what plot the Democratic Party was hatching for my defeat in the coming election. I apologise to my friends of the Democratic Party as well as the American people for lowering the dignity of the high office I hold by my unthinking approval to an indefensible operation which I now realise was also a horrid blunder."

Or, suppose, in the more recent case of Mr Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, had the President, immediately following the breaking of the news of the sexual scandal in the media, made an appeal to the following effect: "I express my heartfelt repentance for my succumbing to the weakness flesh is heir to and the shame I have brought on the unfortunate girl, my family, and my office. I ask for the forgiveness of the American people."

(In such matters, the British do the right thing the right way. The former Prime Minister, Mr John Major, and a former Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, are good examples of admitting their affairs the moment the public got wind of it, and continuing in their jobs without further ado.) Or, suppose Mr Natwar Singh's mentor, Rajiv Gandhi, had come before Parliament and told with total candour, in line with the reputation he till then enjoyed as Mr Clean what he knew of the miasma of pay-offs surrounding the Bofors deal. They would have enhanced their standing in the public eye with a refreshingly happy ending for all of them, instead of unsavoury memories still clinging to them.

Agony and ecstasy

It is a pity Mr Natwar Singh did not think it necessary to draw on history's teachings in such matters of fall from grace. Would he not have evoked the admiration and respect of his friends and adversaries alike had he but come out, on the morrow of the scoop of the Volcker Committee report in The Hindu on October 29, 2005, with something on the following lines:

"I have noticed with concern that my name and that of the Congress Party figure in the list of non-contractual beneficiaries of oil allocations made by the Iraqi Oil Ministry during the presidency of Saddam Hussein. Insofar as I can make out, the background to this is as follows: I had taken my son, Jagat Singh, and Andaleeb Sehgal, a relative of our family, and Jagat's friend, Adiyta Khanna, during my meetings with high officials in the Iraqi Oil Ministry and, in my keenness to help these young persons to develop normal trade and business relations in good faith with their counterparts in Iraq, I had also given them letters of introduction to the Iraqi Oil Minister.

"It now transpires from such enquiries as I have been able to make that the Iraqi authorities had allocated oil vouchers, attributing them to my name and that of the Congress Party, and that these vouchers have been collected, sold through the firms in this line by Andaleeb Sehgal and Aditya Khanna, and the proceeds deposited in their own or their company's bank accounts. It is wrong of them to have done so, especially when it tarnishes my reputation and that of the party to which I am proud to belong and the government as a whole. I deeply regret this fallout of what I now realise as an egregious error of judgment. I have no objection to any investigation being made and suitable action taken in respect of this transaction under Indian laws. I also wish to express my apologies for overstepping my duties in my eagerness to help out my son and his friends who were trying to come up in life."

The matter, insofar as he was concerned would have been closed and he would have still continued as Foreign Minister, and the nation and Parliament would not have had to pass through the prolonged agony (on their part) and the ecstasy (for Mr Natwar Singh's detractors) of subsequent political convulsions.

Not only did Mr Natwar Singh not give a chance to saner voices to prevail, but is doggedly persisting, as a single-man demolition-squad, in doing everything that would write finis to his political career, making him a forgettable has-been of the country's annals. His actions following the publication of the report of the Justice R. S. Pathak Inquiry Authority make one wonder whether, in his case, adversity, instead of doing duty as a university, is injecting a heavy dose of reckless desperation. How else can one explain his affixing his signature to a privilege motion against the Prime Minister, belonging to his own (now erstwhile) party, mouthing the spurious plea that he was only doing so against an institution and not an individual, and that too on the strange ground that the Pathak report was deliberately leaked from the Prime Minister's Office?

His allegation that the maligning to which he has been subjected was all part of an international conspiracy led by the US simply because he was against the Iraq war and the nuclear deal and pro-Iran does not also stand a minute of public scrutiny. The US, certainly, has (God knows) its own repertoire of dirty tricks, but for all that is happening to Mr Natwar Singh, he does not need the excuse of the time-(dis)honoured foreign hand: A look at the reflection in his bathroom mirror will do to know the identity of the person responsible.

Curious network

Then, there is the curious network of friendships he is furiously trying to forge with political opponents of yesteryear, little realising that they will have no hesitation to discard him after using him for their own self-centred purposes. At the moment, their hope is that he has a lot of juicy stuff about the Congress and its leaders up his sleeve and his spilling the beans would serve as a timely electoral bonanza. After exploiting, for as long as it lasts, the titillation his statements and appearance in their midst may cause, they will just dump him and go their way.

In short, the sooner Mr Natwar Singh sheds his hubris which has brought him to this pass vis-a-vis his compatriots, colleagues and associates, the better will he be able to salvage what little political respectability that he still thinks he can lay claim to.

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