ਕੈਪਟਨ ਅਮਰਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘਕੈਪਟਨ ਅਮਰਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ

Captain Amarinder Singh (born 1942) is a politician, military historian and former Indian Army officer from Patiala. A scion of the city's royal family, he twice served as Punjab's chief minister, in 2002 to 2007 and again from 2017 until his resignation in September 2021, and has been a BJP leader since 2022.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Amarinder Singh was born on 11 March 1942 in Patiala to Maharaja Yadavindra Singh, the last ruler of the princely state of Patiala, and Maharani Mohinder Kaur. The family belongs to the Phulkian dynasty, and its home was the Qila Mubarak in Patiala, the residential palace of the Maharajas. He studied at the Lawrence School in Kasauli and the Doon School in Dehradun, where Rajiv Gandhi was a schoolmate.

After the National Defence Academy and the Indian Military Academy, he was commissioned into the Sikh Regiment in 1963 and served as aide-de-camp to Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh, the Western Command chief, from December 1964. He left the army in early 1965 to look after family affairs, returned to service when the 1965 war with Pakistan began, and finally left in December 1966. His father and grandfather had also served, and he has said the army remained his first love. Those three years, the Indian Express notes, shaped the politician he became.

Entry into politics

Amarinder entered politics through the Congress, brought in by his school friend Rajiv Gandhi, and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Patiala in 1980. In 1984, after Operation Blue Star, he resigned from Parliament and quit the Congress in protest. He joined the Shiromani Akali Dal, won the Talwandi Sabo assembly seat, and served as a minister for agriculture, forests, development and panchayats.

In 1986, protesting the Barnala government's approval of Operation Black Thunder, he and Parkash Singh Badal led 27 MLAs in a split from the Akali Dal. In 1992 he broke away to form his own Shiromani Akali Dal (Panthic). The experiment ended badly: in the assembly election that followed he polled just 856 votes in his own constituency, and he merged his party back into the Congress in 1998. He went on to head the Punjab Congress three times.

Chief minister: two terms

He became chief minister in 2002. In that first term his government passed the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act in 2004, legislating Punjab out of its river water sharing agreements with neighbouring states, a move aimed at the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal dispute that remains one of the most debated acts of his career. After the Congress lost power, a special committee of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha expelled him in September 2008 over alleged irregularities in an Amritsar Improvement Trust land transfer. In 2010 the Supreme Court held the expulsion unconstitutional.

He returned to Parliament in 2014, defeating the senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley in Amritsar by 102,770 votes, and was appointed Punjab Congress president again on 27 November 2015. In 2017 he led the Congress to a more than two-thirds majority and was sworn in as chief minister on 16 March 2017. India Today noted that he remains the only Congress chief minister to win two Punjab assembly elections since 1966.

The second term drew growing criticism. Opponents and many in his own party said he was inaccessible, running the government from a farmhouse near Chandigarh, and that he had been soft on the Badals over the Bargari sacrilege case. After months of a public feud with Navjot Singh Sidhu, he resigned on 18 September 2021, saying he felt humiliated by the way he had been treated. He was the first Punjab chief minister in 24 years not to complete a term, and Charanjit Singh Channi succeeded him.

After the Congress: Punjab Lok Congress and the BJP

Amarinder founded the Punjab Lok Congress on 2 November 2021 and contested the 2022 assembly election in alliance with the BJP. The new party won no seat, lost its deposit in all but one of the 28 seats it contested, and he himself lost Patiala to Ajit Pal Singh Kohli of the Aam Aadmi Party.

On 19 September 2022 he merged the Punjab Lok Congress into the Bharatiya Janata Party and joined the BJP, taking a seat on its national executive. He was absent from the BJP campaign in Punjab in the 2024 general election for health reasons, and returned to public view in October 2024 with a visit to the grain market in Khanna.

Writing and personal life

Alongside politics, Amarinder has written seven books on military history and Sikh history. They include A Ridge Too Far, Lest We Forget, The Last Sunset: Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar, The Sikhs in Britain: 150 Years of Photographs, Honour and Fidelity, on India's military contribution to the First World War, and The Monsoon War, which carries his memoirs of the 1965 war. Khushwant Singh wrote his authorised biography, Captain Amarinder Singh: The People's Maharaja, published in 2017. The Indian Express also describes him as a keen cook and an avid gardener.

His wife, Preneet Kaur, was a Member of Parliament and served as Minister of State for External Affairs from 2009 to 2012. Their son Raninder Singh and daughter Jai Inder Kaur are both in politics.

How many times was Amarinder Singh chief minister of Punjab?

Twice: from 2002 to 2007, and from 16 March 2017 until he resigned on 18 September 2021.

Which party is Amarinder Singh in now?

The Bharatiya Janata Party. He left the Congress in 2021, founded the Punjab Lok Congress, and merged it with the BJP on 19 September 2022.