Natwar Singh

Kunwar Natwar Singh, IFS (born 16 May 1929) is an Indian diplomat and politician who served as the Minister of External Affairs from May 2004 to December 2005.

Singh was selected into the Indian Foreign Service in 1953.

Singh joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1953 and served for 31 years.

One of his earliest assignments was in Beijing, China (1956–58).

He was then posted to New York City at the Permanent Mission of India (1961–66) and as India's representative to executive board of UNICEF (1962–66).

He served on several UN committees between 1963 and 1966.

In 1966, he was posted to the Prime Minister's Secretariat under Indira Gandhi.

He served as India's Ambassador to Poland from 1971 to 1973, India's Deputy High Commissioner to U.K. from 1973 to 1977 and India's Ambassador to Pakistan from 1980 to 1982.

He was part of the Indian delegation to the Heads of Commonwealth Meeting in Kingston, Jamaica in 1975.

He was an Indian Delegate to the 30th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, Heads of Commonwealth Meeting, Lusaka, Zambia in 1979 and the 35th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York.

He served as an Executive Trustee, United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) appointed by the Secretary-General, United Nations for six years (1981–86).

He also accompanied Indira Gandhi on her State visit to the US in 1982.

He also served on the Expert Group appointed by the Secretary General of the Commonwealth, London in 1982.

He served as Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs from March 1982 to November 1984.

He was appointed Secretary-General of the Seventh Non-aligned Summit in New Delhi held in 1983 and Chief Coordinator of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in New Delhi in the same year.

In 1984, he resigned from the service to contest elections as a member of the Indian National Congress party.

He received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India from the Government of India, in 1984.

In 1984, after resigning from the Indian Foreign Service, Singh joined the Congress party and was elected to the 8th Lok Sabha from Bharatpur constituency in Rajasthan.

In 1985, he was sworn in as a minister of state (who is a minister, but one level below a cabinet minister) and allotted the portfolios of steel, coal and mines, and agriculture.

In 1986, he became minister of state for external affairs.

In that capacity, he was elected President of the UN Conference on Disarmament and Development held in New York in 1987, and also led the Indian delegation to the 42nd Session of the UN General Assembly.

He won the election and served as a union minister of state until 1989.

Singh remained a minister of state for external affairs until the Congress party lost power after being defeated in the general elections of 1989.

In those elections, he contested and lost the Mathura seat in Uttar Pradesh.

The Congress party returned to power after the elections of 1991, with P.V. Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister since Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated.

At this time, Singh was not an MP and could not be a minister.

He developed differences with the Prime Minister and left the party along with N.D. Tiwari and Arjun Singh, to form a new political party, All India Indira Congress.

In 1998, after Sonia Gandhi had regained complete control of the party, the three family loyalists merged their new party into the Congress party and returned into the service of the Gandhis.

Singh was rewarded with a ticket to contest the general elections of 1998, and returned to parliament after a gap of nine years, when he was elected to the 12th Lok Sabha (1998–99) from Bharatpur.

He had to sit in the opposition benches, however, and then he lost the elections of 1999.

After a further hiatus of three years, he was elected (indirectly) to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan in 2002.

Thereafter, he had a patchy political career until being made India's foreign minister in 2004.

However, 18 months later, he had to resign after the UN's Volcker committee named both him and the Congress party to which he belonged as beneficiaries of illegal pay-offs in the Iraqi oil scam.

The fourth son of Govind Singh and his wife Prayag Kaur of village 'Jagheena', Singh was born in the princely state of Bharatpur in an aristocrat Jat Hindu family related to the ruling dynasty of Bharatpur.

He attended Mayo College, Ajmer and Scindia School, Gwalior, both traditional educational institutions for Indian princely clans and nobles.

Thereafter he took an undergraduate degree at St. Stephen's College, Delhi.

He subsequently studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University and was a visiting scholar for a period at Peking University in China.

The Congress party came back to power in 2004, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed Natwar Singh as the Minister for External affairs.

Singh assumed office on 23 May 2004 as India's minister for external affairs.

On 27 October 2005, while Singh was abroad on an official visit, the Independent Inquiry Committee headed by Paul Volcker released the report on its investigation of corruption in the Oil-for-Food program.