Captain Amarinder Singh

Amarinder Singh is the son of Maharaja Yadavindra Singh of Patiala. He studied at Lawrence School, Sanawar, and the Doon School, then at the National Defence Academy from 1959 to 1963. He was commissioned in 1963 into the 2nd Battalion of the Sikh Regiment, in which his father and grandfather had served, fought in the 1965 war and served as aide-de-camp to Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh. The Tribune calls him a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi. He was first elected to Parliament in January 1980.

Operation Blue Star changed his course. On 10 June 1984 he went public through the BBC's Mark Tully, resigning from Parliament and the Congress over the army's entry into Sri Akal Takht Sahib. According to an authorised biography by Khushwant Singh, excerpted by Scroll, he had agreed beforehand with several Punjab Congress MPs that they would all resign if troops entered the Golden Temple, but only he carried it through. Another Punjab MP, Devinder Singh Garcha, also resigned a couple of days later. The same account quotes Amarinder saying his decision was beyond politics. He joined the Akali Dal in August 1985.

Key moments

• 2002 to 2007: Chief Minister of Punjab for the Congress. In 2004 his government passed the law ending Punjab's river-water sharing agreements with neighbouring states.
• 2014: won the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat, defeating Arun Jaitley. He later resigned as MP in November after the Supreme Court termed the 2004 Act unconstitutional.
• 2017: led the Congress to a landslide in the 117-member assembly and became Chief Minister again. In 2020 his government brought four bills in the assembly to counter the Centre's farm laws.
• 18 September 2021: resigned as Chief Minister after more than 50 MLAs wrote to Sonia Gandhi asking for a change. He said he felt humiliated.
• November 2021: quit the Congress and named his new party the Punjab Lok Congress.
• 2022: his party won no seat in the assembly election and he lost Patiala Urban. On 19 September 2022 he merged the party into the BJP in New Delhi.

He is also an author, with books that include a memoir of the 1965 war.

What he is remembered for: two terms as Chief Minister, and the June 1984 resignation, which his authorised biographer says raised his standing among most Sikhs. Critics at the time called it a betrayal: about twenty Congress MLAs said so in a joint statement. His later moves, from the Akali Dal back to the Congress, and then out of it into the BJP, are part of the record of Punjab's politics, which readers will judge differently.