Captain Amarinder Singh, the former Chief Minister of Punjab, will be merging his Punjab Lok Congress party with the Bharatiya Janata Party today. The merger comes after a bitter parting from the Congress and a humiliating defeat in the Punjab state assembly polls earlier this year. But this is not the first political merger in Capt. Singh’s political career.

Capt. Singh was born to Maharaja Sir Yadavindra Singh and Maharani Mohinder Kaur of Patiala, the erstwhile monarchs of the princely state of Patiala. Capt. Singh entered the political arena at the behest of Rajiv Gandhi, a school friend. Joining the INC, Capt. Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1980. He resigned from the seat and the party after Operation Blue Star.

Shifting to the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in 1985, Capt. Singh was elected to the state assembly from Talwandi Sabo and held the portfolio of the Ministries of Agriculture, Forest, Development and Panchayats. But seven months later, he resigned again in protest of the Surjit Singh Barnala-led government's decision to send police inside Darbar Sahib. While Capt. Singh remained with the SAD, it was only in 1992 that he left the party over differences.

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Emerging as a champion for Sikhs in the state, Capt. Singh formed his first party, the Shiromani Akali Dal (Panthic). After a crushing defeat in the subsequent state assembly elections, Capt. Singh elected to merge with the INC once more in 1998. Just a year later, Capt. Singh was instrumental in the party’s success in the state in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, for which Sonia Gandhi made him the state chief of the party.

Becoming the Chief Minister in 2002, Capt. Singh’s first term saw decisions like the passing of the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act in 2004 and a crackdown on graft which resulted in former CM Parkash Singh Badal and his son Sukhbir Singh Badal being sent to jail for a while. In 2015, he defeated BJP’s Arun Jaitley on an outside seat in Amritsar during the Lok Sabha elections.

He returned as the Chief Minister of Punjab in 2017, but his second term was marred by political infighting and growing dissatisfaction with the INC’s leadership in Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi. The infighting resulted in his resignation and exit from INC, following which Charanjit Singh Channi was made the next CM and his bitter critic Navjot Singh Sidhu was made the state Congress chief.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)