Congress President Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke in unison on Thursday against revelations made by former party loyalist K Natwar Singh in his yet-to-be-released autobiography, One Life is Not Enough .

While Manmohan dismissed Natwar’s assertion that files from the PMO were sent to the Congress President as a move to “market his product”, Sonia said she was not affected or hurt by her former loyalist’s barbs.

She had been through much worse — her husband Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi being riddled with bullets — and would not be affected by minor political attacks, she stressed.

“I am far from getting hurt by these things. They do not affect me,” she said.

Inner voice

Sonia, who had said her “inner voice” guided her when she refused to be Prime Minister after leading the Congress to victory in 2004, was confronted by journalists on Thursday with Natwar’s claim that Rahul stopped her because he feared for her life.

She replied by saying that the truth will come out only when she writes a book.

“I will write my own book and then you will come to know everything...

“The only way truth will come out is if I write...I am serious about it and I will be writing,” she told reporters in Parliament House.

Manmohan, at the same time, applied the logic of insiders “marketing” their position for “capital gains” even to his former media advisor Sanjay Baru, whose book The Accidental Prime Minister had made similar claims about Sonia’s interference in the PMO.

“I had contradicted it then, I repeat that this is not true… This is their way of trying to market their product,” the former PM said.

Capital gains

About Natwar giving details of his meeting with Sonia and her daughter Priyanka Gandhi, who apparently tried to persuade him not to write the book, Manmohan: said: “Private conversation should not be made public for capital gains.”

Natwar Singh was External Affairs Minister when the sensational report of the Volcker Committee listed him and the Congress as “non-contractual beneficiaries” of Iraqi oil sales in 2001 under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme.

The Volcker Committee was an independent inquiry committee appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Its mission was to investigate the administration and management of the Oil-for-Food Programme.

Subsequent to this report, the Justice RS Pathak Inquiry Authority investigated the Iraqi oil-for-food scam and found that the Natwar and his son Jagat Singh “misused” their positions in getting contracts.

Power misuse

The 110-page report traced the money trail to Andaleeb Sehgal, Director of Hamdan Exports and a friend of Jagat, and Aditya Khanna, a relative of Natwar and brother of Arvind Khanna, a Congress MLA from Punjab. Sehgal and Aditya Khanna transferred the money to their Swiss bank accounts, the report said.

Natwar was subsequently sacked from the Cabinet as well as the Congress.

His son is a BJP MLA in Rajasthan.

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