Lucknow, May 6 : Rashtriya Lok Dal(RLD) president Ajit Singh, a prominent Jat leader, entered politics by accident after his father and former prime minister Choudhury Charan Singh fell ill.

In his political career spanning 35 years, Singh aligned himself with parties of different motives and backgrounds and always sided with the ruling combination except since 2014 after the BJP came to power at the centre.

He had been given a prominent position in the Union Government Cabinet four times. Singh handled the legacy of ideology of his father former Prime Minister late Chaudhary Charan Singh and was also recognized as the leader of the farmer class as well as a prominent Jat leader of Western UP.

Even though he had no interest in politics in his earlier life, he had to join his father’s political party when the latter got very ill, on the insistence of his father’s followers in 1986.

He was 47 when he jumped into politics and immediately displayed his acumen which proved that politics was in his blood.

His entry in politics happened in 1986 when there was a huge rally organised by then district presidents of Lokdal, and he was welcomed with a green-coloured Maruti Gypsy as a gift, after which Singh never looked back.

He had a keen interest in agriculture and computer technology. He was a computer scientist by profession and worked with multinationals such as IBM in the United States for almost 15 years before returning to India and joining the politics to lead the prominent Jat community .

Singh became the member of Rajya Sabha in 1986 and after the death of his father the very next year, he was asked to step forward as the leader of the party, which was not acceptable to fellow party leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna.

The party was then divided into factions of Jats and the backward classes. With the support of Jats, Ajit Singh merged his newly formed party, Lok Dal (Ajit) with Janata Party. He won every Lok Sabha election he contested from Baghpat, which was his father’s constituency, except the one which he lost to Som Nath Shastri in 1998.

After being elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1986 and separating himself to form Lok Dal (A), Singh merged his party with Janata Party and became its president in 1988. The party leaders further merged the Janata Party with the Jan Morcha, which was then headed by VP Singh.

This new party was named Janata Dal and Singh was made Secretary General.

In 1989, he won the election and became the Industries Minister. At this time he was the part of the National Front government with Vishwanath Pratap Singh as the PM.

In the mid 1990s Ajit Singh, along with other Janata Dal leaders, left the party to join the Indian National Congress and became a minister in the PV Narasimha Rao government.

In 1996, he again won the Baghpat seat under the Congress banner and became the Union Food Minister. Just after one year, he resigned from the party and formed a separate party, Bhartiya Kisan Kamgar Party. Also, he resigned from Lok Sabha and contested the election to be victorious again by defeating the Congress candidate, Mukhiya Gurjar.

He supported the United Front government and contested election in 1998, which brought him his first defeat by Som Pal Shastri of the BJP. The very next year, he formed a new party, Rashtriya Lok Dal, and won the election.

He was supporting the Bahujan Samaj Party government in Uttar Pradesh but suddenly in 2003 withdrew his support, which ultimately caused the downfall of the Mayawati government. It was after the parting of the BJP and the BSP. Then in July the very same year, his party tied up with the Bharatiya Janata Party when the UP assembly elections were approaching. He won the Lok Sabha election to become the Union Minister for Agriculture.

In 2002, he supported the Samajwadi party, headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav, the then party in power in UP, but withdrew the support just before the Assembly elections in 2007 due to differences on farmers’ policies.

In 2009, again he joined hands with the BJP-led NDA and was re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Baghpat only. After two years, in December 2011, just before the UP Assembly elections, he came back to the Congress and now became the Civil Aviation Minister in UPA regime.

He was the candidate of Muzaffarnagar from RLD and he lost to Sanjeev Balyan of BJP by a margin of 6526 votes in 2014 and again lost from Baghpat in 2019.

Born on February 12, 1939 to Choudhary Charan Singh, and Gayatri Devi in Bhadola, Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh, Ajit Singh did his B.Sc. from Lucknow University and then opted for B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur.

He is also an alumnus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, from where he completed his Master of Science. He worked in couple of Multi national companies including IBM for around 15 years. He was one of the first Indian to work with IBM in 1960.

Now his son , former MP Jayant Choudhury is his political heir after his death on Wednesday due to Corona.(UNI)