The first senior Congress Minister to be sent packing in this government, Foreign Minister Natwar Singh was given a soft landing today. Although he had dug his heels in following the publication of the Volcker Report, the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi persuaded him to agree to be a Minster without Portfolio till such time as the probes ordered by the Government can clear his name. “From day one, the Prime Minister was clear that he would have to go, either resign or be moved to another portfolio,” said a senior Congress leader. “Natwar Singh was busy mobilising support within the UPA to ward off pressures, and the Left, DMK, NCP and the RJD backed his continuation in office. But if he had quit immediately, it would have been seen as an admission of guilt, and this had its own implication for the Congress Party, which too has been named as a non-contractual beneficiary in Iraq’s oil-for-food programme.” In any case, the delay in getting him to agree to give up Foreign Affairs helped to distance the Congress from Natwar Singh, sources said. Natwar compounded the problem for himself by going on a statement-issuing spree , further eroding his credibility. Though the zing has gone out of the controversy, the Opposition parties are not going to let go of the issue and will raise it during the winter session of Parliament starting Nov 23. “Natwar was expendable since he had antagonized a lot of people in the party, the Congress leadership was buying time getting its act together.” said a Congress leader. The stage is now set for the long awaited Cabinet reshuffle that has been on the cards for months. With the PM likely to retain the Foreign Affairs department with himself—that may increase the role of both the NSA MK Narayanan and of the MOS PMO Prithviraj Chavan—the reshuffle may now be a small one and go to fill the vacancies that exist, after the exit of Jagdish Tytler and the death of Sunil Dutt. It may take place after November 15 when the PM returns from Dhaka. Earlier, Natwar tried hard to show that it was business as usual. He attended office, joined the Prime Minister at the Hyderabad House for bilateral discussions with the Czech President, even held a telephonic conversation with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing in the afternoon and discussed with him the upcoming IAEA meeting on the Iran nuclear issue. He later participated in the GoM for the Commonwealth Games and even gave suggestions at the meeting. All this happened while the drama continued, the high point being Natwar’s meeting with the PM this evening. The dinners and ceremonials aside, the cold fact at the end of the day was that Natwar Singh will not be in Dhaka to attend the foreign ministers meeting on November 10 ahead of the SAARC Summit. The possibility is that one of the two Ministers of State in the MEA will represent the country.
