Arun Singh

Arun Singh is an Indian politician, born in 1944 at Srinagar into the royal family of Kapurthala, and a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi. He should not be confused with the BJP politician of the same name. His father, Maharajkumar Karamjit Singh, was a son of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, a state whose ruling family descends from Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and the Ahluwalia misl. He studied at the Doon School, St Stephen's College in Delhi and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was a classmate of Rajiv Gandhi, and went into business after his MA in 1971.

In September 1985, under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, he was appointed Minister of State for Defence (research and development), in charge of modernising the armed forces. His place in Punjab's history comes from the accounts that put him in Rajiv Gandhi's circle at the time of the June 1984 attack on Sri Harmandir Sahib, Operation Blue Star. Writing in Mainstream in 2018, the journalist Kuldip Nayar relayed that R.K. Dhawan, Indira Gandhi's personal secretary, said Rajiv Gandhi, Arun Nehru and Arun Singh pushed the decision because they believed a successful Army operation would win them the elections "hands down". Nayar gives this as reported and second hand, and the article does not verify it. No account from Arun Singh himself was found in the sources opened.

Key moments

• 1944: born at Srinagar.
• September 1985: appointed Minister of State for Defence.
• 15 July 1987: resigns. The UPI reported on 18 July that President Zail Singh accepted the resignation on Rajiv Gandhi's advice and that no reason was given. Outlook later wrote that he quit when allegations of kickbacks in the Bofors gun deal surfaced, upset at having been kept in the dark after defending the deal in Parliament. He has said he received no money from the company.
• After 1987: withdraws to Binsar in the hills for more than a decade of self-imposed political exile.
• 1999: returns as special executive assistant to External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, on an honorary salary of one rupee a month, advising on the military side of the Kargil conflict.

He is known in Indian politics for resigning over Bofors, and in this history for the reporting that places him among the advisers around Rajiv Gandhi in 1984.