In her strongest public denouncement of former foreign minister Natwar Singh following the Volcker report, Congress President Sonia Gandhi has called her former colleague a betrayer and accused him of unfairly using the party’s name.

In an interview to NDTV to be telecast on Friday, Sonia said, “As it became clearer that it was true, that my colleague had misused the name of the party in some ways, I felt extremely betrayed..... He was a colleague in whom I had placed trust and I felt very terribly betrayed.”

Sonia, who broke her silence on her once trusted confidant, had all along refrained from making any direct remark on Natwar Singh’s conduct, only saying in the wake of the Pathak Committee Report that indicted he and his son, Jagat, that the guilty would be punished.

Sonia was asked about the reports on differences with PM Manmohan Singh, especially on the issue of the fuel price hike, to which she responded by telling the interviewer that “we are not competitors”.

According to her, there had been a “miscommunication about the exact figure” and that was not a problem. She revealed during the interview that Singh had been her choice for PM even in 1999 when the Congress nearly formed the government but was unable to muster the numbers.

She had met then President KR Narayanan to inform him that Singh would lead a Congress government if it came to power. “In fact I went first on my own and then with Dr Manmohan Singh,” she said about her meetings with Narayanan on the issue.

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