Rajesh Pilot

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Rajesh Pilot was a minister in Government of India. He represented Dausa in Lok Sabha. He was a leader of Indian National Congress party. He died on 11 June 2000 in a car accident near Jaipur.Before joing politics he was a pilot,hence his surname.His real name was Rajeshwar Prasad Singh. He was a friend of late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who brought him in politics. He belonged to the Gujjar caste. Born in Viadpura a village in Ghaziabad UP to an armyman but brought up in a poor family of his uncle at Delhi near Gurdwara Rakab Ganj, he worked hard to get in to the Indian Air Force from where he resigned from the post of Squadron Leader to join the politics. He gave the credit of his success to his early rising nature which he learnt from his hardship days of childhood. Once he once used to come to the Kothis of Delhi to sell milk where in his later life he resided after joining the politics. On his first election he defeated the former queen of Bharatpur. He sent Chandraswami in to the prison while he was Internal Security Minister. A simple man of clean political image even once rose against the party high command for fare and free election of the President of Congress. Though he lost to Sitaram Kesri but kept himself in the first line of the politics thereafter. This was the second time when India's largest political organisation went for an election to choose its president after the famous 1938 elections when Subhash Bose defeated Mahatma Gandhi backed Pattabhi Sitaramayya.