ET TU, Natwar? The Bard himself would have been inspired by the drama in the corridors of 10, Janpath, home to Delhi’s most-powerful darbar for decades, to attempt a Taming of the Shrew, with glimpses of a Roman tragedy.

The darbar, a euphemism for the Congress party, is in terminal decline. Its ageing queen is struggling with failing health and diminishing influence. The heir apparent, like the last of the descendants of the powerful Mughal dynasty that once ruled Delhi, is showing neither the desire nor the ability to regain what was lost or retain what is slipping away.

Such periods of decay and decadence have historically been the perfect opportunity for courtiers to find a new benefactor and estranged darbaris to plot vengeance against those who once kept them alive in corridors of power for years with their largesse and alms but later threw out.

Natwar Singh, former foreign minister of India, is an erudite scholar of both history and palace intrigues. Clearly, he knows his night of long knives has arrived. So, after sulking and seething for 10 years, he has plunged his dagger deep into the heart of the bed-ridden dynasty. Singh, who lost his job nine years ago after it was alleged that he was moonlighting as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain’s public relations agent, has ‘revealed’ in his autobiography that Congress President Sonia Gandhi is not the paradigm of ‘sacrifice’ she was called for renouncing the job of India’s prime minister in 2004.

Singh claims Sonia backed off after an ultimatum from her son Rahul, who feared for her life if she became the prime minister, and not because she listened to her ‘inner voice,’ as she had claimed then. Rahul is heir to Sonia’s leadership of the party that ruled India for almost 60 years but shrunk to less than 10 percent seats in the recent Parliamentary elections. The noble idea is to get back at Sonia after four decades of genuflecting and curtseying in the dynasty’s darbar and a decade of being left outside. Sonia, on her part, has rejected the claim, saying she would write her own version of history soon.

Now there is no surprise in a spurned courtier’s attempt at getting even with the queen who got him politically neutered for his fling with Saddam. The Congress is on its deathbed and many who would have once gladly killed to kiss the mud on which the Gandhis used to tread are now mustering the courage to throw the same muck at their retreating shadows. Typical human nature, you would say, and forgive ‘Sulking’ Singh.

Also, there must be something missing in the moral fiber of a man who tries to run down a government he was part of as a senior minister after a decade. But we are not talking about such delayed outbreaks of conscience that are so common to politicians either.

The real question here is this: Would you believe Singh’s word as honest narration of events? Is it his word against hers or vice-versa? Such ‘your word against mine’ battles are difficult to decide in the absence of irrefutable evidence or a third, independent voice. When sitting in judgment, you have little choice but to make up your mind on the basis of the personal integrity of the prattling politicians.

And this is where Singh’s attempt at castigating Sonia for her intellectual dishonesty fails. A closer look at Singh’s checkered history makes his account of Sonia’s political life resemble Bill Clinton’s sermon on fidelity. Singh’s own life is full of moral and intellectual transgressions, turning him into the proverbial sieve pointing out a hole in a needle. Look who is talking!

Singh’s story began in Bharatpur, an erstwhile princely state that is an hour’s drive from Agra, where his father was a retainer of the Maharaja. The Maharaja’s heir Vishwendra Singh sniggers at the very mention of Singh’s name.

“He uses the title Kunwar to pass himself off as the scion of Sinsinwars, the former royals of Bharatpur. He isn’t one,” Vishwendra had once told this writer.

Jump to the 80s, where we find Singh in the good books of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by virtue of his role in the Indian Foreign Service. After Indira’s assassination, her son Rajiv offers him a ticket to contest from Bharatpur and launches his political career, a favor he is now returning with his tell-all book on his widow and son.

And fast-forward, finally, to December 2005, where we find him being ignominiously kicked out of the darbar after being named in the UN’s report (known as Paul Volcker Committee’s findings) on beneficiaries of Iraq’s oil-for-food scam. The arrangement, as Volcker revealed, with the Saddam regime was simple: Politicians and their families got kickbacks from fictitious sale of oil for buying food.

So, essentially Singh was clocking up those frequent flier miles as foreign minister only to lobby for oil coupons for his son and his cohorts. Not the ideal candidate for a Bharat Ratna for honesty, loyalty or integrity. Will you take his word as gospel or gossip?

Consider next his insinuation that Sonia was manipulated by her pusillanimous son. But if it were to look at the way how Singh himself became a mendicant puppet in the hands of his son Jagat, a loutish character who is now a legislator in the western Indian state of Rajasthan by virtue of being a courtier in the darbar of Chief Minister Maharani’s Vasundhara Raje, then Dhritrashtra, a mythological Indian character who ruined his son with blind love, would sound like a priest of parenthood.

Doting fathers are a well-known Indian species; they are rather the norm than exception. Indian history and mythology is full of tales of ruin brought upon themselves by men of great courage and virtue because of their weakness for their brood. All of them have one thing in common: Their inability to see the enemy sitting across the dining table. After he was booted out of the Congress and the Manmohan Singh Cabinet, Singh had the opportunity to break away from his son.

But he did the exact opposite and became a prisoner of his ego and love for his wayward son, whose life was wrecked by scams, scandals and the unfortunate suicide of Jagat’s socialite wife Natasha, who jumped off a Delhi five-star’s balcony. For his son, Singh vainly tried to become a casteist leader, dropped the elitist Kunwar in his name for Chaudhary for raising his sex-appeal among members of his Jat community, joined Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party — from where he was kicked out with son Jagat in tow — and then finally took refuge in BJP leader Raje’s Jaipur darbar.

You could argue that Singh’s journey from the Bharatpur darbar to Jaipur via Delhi delivered the desired result. Son Jagat is now a politician and serves the BJP — the rightwing party Natwar fought all his life — as a legislator. Papa Singh can perhaps gleefully pat himself for being an ideal father.

But during all these years, with his penchant for volte-face, moral compromises and political buffoonery, Singh lost whatever was left of his credibility after the Volcker shocker. His latest yarn may turn his book into a best-seller. But those who know him would search his autobiography only in the fiction catalogue.