Former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh passed away. The news agency PTI quoted the veteran politician’s family as saying that Natwar breathed his last at a private hospital in Gurugram on Saturday night. He was 93 years old. Natbwar has been suffering from various diseases related to old age for the past few years.
Natwar was born in 1931 in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur district. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1953 at the age of 22. He was appointed as Deputy High Commissioner of India in Britain from 1973 to 1977. In 1980, Natwar was sent to Pakistan as the Indian ambassador. However, he joined politics after leaving the bureaucratic job. Natwar was the foreign minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet during the first UPA government. But his ministry lasted only one year. He had to leave the ministry due to allegations of corruption. In the ‘food for oil’ dispute with Iraq, Natwar was accused of massive degrees of corruption.
The opposition demanded his removal from the post of foreign minister. Before that, Natwar also joined Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet, first as Minister of State for Steel, Mines, Coal, and Agriculture and later as Minister of State for External Affairs.
However, despite the many controversies, Natwar was known as the ‘closest’ of the Gandhi family. The veteran leader demanded that someone from the Gandhi family be appointed to the top post of the party when there was a demand to bring a new face to the post of party president after successive electoral defeats of the Congress.
After completing his studies in history at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, Natwar went on to study at Cambridge University in Britain. The Indian government bestowed the Padma Vibhushan award on the veteran politician. Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma has expressed grief over Natwar’s death.
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