New Delhi: National President of Rashtriya Lok Dal and former Union Minister Chaudhary Ajit Singh has passed away. Party leader and his son Jayant Chaudhary gave this information on Twitter. He tweeted that ‘Chaudhary sahib is no more’. He was corona infected.
RLD chief Chaudhary Ajit Singh was corona infected on 22 April. Since then, the infection in his lungs was growing rapidly. Ajith Singh’s health had worsened on Tuesday night. After this, he was admitted to a private hospital in Gurugram.
The son of former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, Chaudhary Ajit Singh was a seven-time MP from Baghpat. He also served as the Union Minister of Civil Aviation.
Son of a formidable farmer leader Charan Singh, who helmed the country for six months in 1979-1980, Ajit Singh worked 15 years in the computer industry in the United States before he returned to the country to inherit the political fief of his father in the prosperous western Uttar Pradesh.
An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Ajit Singh was first elected to Rajya Sabha in 1986.
The seven-time member of Lok Sabha, Ajit Singh, represented the family’s pocket borough of Baghpat in the Lower House of Parliament. His party RLD wields influence in Jat-dominated western Uttar Pradesh.
Ajit Singh forayed from Lok Dal to Congress and allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Samajwadi Party.
Perceived as a fair-weather friend or an opportunist by his critics, Ajit Singh switched alliances in an effort to remain on the winning side.
Ajit Singh was inducted as the Union minister of industry in the VP Singh government. He joined the PV Narasimha Rao government as food minister but resigned from the Congress in 1996.
Ajit Singh formed RLD and joined the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government as agriculture minister in 2001. He was part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government till May 2003.
Ajit Singh joined the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) later after forging an alliance with the Congress for assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh.
