Natwar Singh, former External Affairs Minister, passes away

Former External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh passed away on Saturday (August 11, 2024). He was 95 and was hospitalized for nearly two weeks in a clinic in Gurugram, outside New Delhi. Singh served as the External Affairs Minister in 2004-05 in the Cabinet of former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh of the UPA.

A prolific writer and chronicler, Natwar Singh started his career as an Indian Foreign Service officer in 1953 and took early retirement in 1984 when he contested from Bharatpur in Rajasthan and became a Lok Sabha MP. He served as the Minister of State for Steel in the Rajiv Gandhi government and became the Minister of State for External Affairs in 1986. Apart from leading India’s multilateral campaigns at that time, he also participated in the Indian plans for bringing an “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned” government at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He visited Rome and tried to pursue Afghan King Zahir Shah in the spring of 1988.

Singh joined the IFS on April 14, 1953, at the age of 22 and was at the South Block and the districts where he served for the next four years. At that young age, he served as a liaison officer for multiple delegations from China, Egypt and Indonesia, giving him an impression of the working of the President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Dr. Mohammad Hatta of Indonesia.