Chaudhary Ajit Singh
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| Chaudhary Ajit Singh | |
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| Constituency | Baghpat |
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| Born | 12 February 1939 Meerut, Uttar Pradesh |
| Political party | RLD |
| Spouse | Radhika Singh |
| Children | 1 son and 2 daughters |
| Residence | Meerut |
| As of September 21, 2006 Source: [1] |
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Chaudhary Ajit Singh is a prominent Jat leader from Uttar Pradesh, India. He is the founder and chief of the Rashtriya Lok Dal, a political party recognised in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He was born on 12 February 1939 into a Jat family at village Bhadola in the Meerut District of Uttar Pradesh. He is the son of former prime minister of India and Jat leader Choudhary Charan Singh. He is married, with one son and two daughters.
[edit] Education
Ajit Singh was educated as an engineer at Lucknow University, IIT, Kharagpur and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has a special interest in agriculture and modern technology. He worked in the U.S. computer industry for 17 years, returning to India in the late 1980s to revive the Lok Dal party founded by his father Charan Singh.
[edit] Politics
Ajit Singh first entered Parliament as a Rajya Sabha member for Uttar Pradesh in 1986, and is a four time member of the Lok Sabha. Singh formed his own faction of the Lok Dal called Lok Dal (Ajit) in 1987 and a year later merged it with the Janata Party, as part of a deal by which he became President of the merged party. When the Janata Dal was formed by a merger of the Janata Party, H.N. Bahuguna's faction of the Lok Dal and the Jan Morcha, Singh was elected its secretary general. He was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 and re-elected in 1991.
He became a Union minister for the first time in 1989-90 when he was inducted into the National Front government of Vishwanath Pratap Singh.
In the mid-nineties, he moved to the Congress Party, then in power, with a large slice of the Janata Dal MPs. He went on to become the food minister under the Congress government (1995-96) when P V Narasimha Rao was the prime minister. After winning the 1996 Lok Sabha poll on a Congress ticket, he left the party within a year to form the Bharatiya Kisan Kamgar Party. He resigned from Lok Sabha membership and contested the consequent bye-election as a BKKP candidate in Baghpat, defeating his Samajwadi Party rival.
Singh lost the 1998 election to Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Som Pal but avenged the defeat in 1999 after floating his new party, the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
In July 2001, he agreed to tie-up with the Bharatiya Janata Party in upcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and joined the BJP-led government as the important Cabinet Minister for Agriculture. He subsequently joined an alliance between the BJP and Bahujan Samaj Party. In May 2003, only a few months before the BJP and BSP split up, Ajit withdrew from the government and the Cabinet.
When Mulayam Singh Yadav came to power, Ajit befriended him and supported him up until early 2007, when he left the government once again. He is currently not aligned with any party at the Central or state level.
