Rajnath Singh

Rajnath Singh (born July 10, 1951, Chandauli, Uttar Pradesh, India) is an Indian politician, government official, and a major figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; Indian People’s Party) who has served as minister of defense since 2019. A soft-spoken man who generally kept a low public profile, he became one of the party’s staunchest advocates of its Hindutva ideology, which sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values. His rise to the top ranks within the party was lauded as demonstrating the BJP’s democratic strength.

Early life and education

Singh was raised in a farming family in southeastern Uttar Pradesh in northern India. He earned a master’s degree in physics from Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, and embarked on a teaching career as a lecturer of physics at the K.B. Postgraduate College in Mirzapur. His affiliations with Hindu right-wing organizations began during his student days. Singh joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) when he was 13 years old. Between 1969 and 1971 he was the organizational secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, the student wing of the RSS) in Gorakhpur. He became the general secretary of the RSS’s Mirzapur branch in 1972.

Early rise in politics

Singh entered into active politics two years later, when he became a member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Indian People’s Association), then the political wing of the RSS and precursor to the BJP. He was arrested in 1975 during the state of emergency declared by then-prime minister Indira Gandhi and was held in detention until 1977. Following his release that year, he was elected to the lower chamber of the Uttar Pradesh state legislature in his first run for public office. The BJP was established in 1980, and three years later Singh was named secretary of the party in Uttar Pradesh. In 1984 he became the state president of the BJP’s youth wing, Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM; Indian People’s Youth Movement). In 1986 he became the BJYM’s national general secretary, and in 1988 he was appointed as the organization’s national president.

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Singh was elected to the upper chamber of the state legislature in 1988. Three years later he became the state’s minister of education, after the BJP had achieved a majority in elections to the assembly. While he was serving in that office, the party undertook a controversial program of rewriting portions of history and mathematics textbooks to reflect a more religious viewpoint. Also controversial during Singh’s tenure was the enactment of a law in 1992 intended to prevent cheating during the school and college examinations; the resulting lower graduation rates and public arrests of a large number of alleged cheaters sparked protests, and the law was later repealed.

Leadership roles in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

Singh’s political career moved back and forth between state and national politics, interspersed with leadership roles within the BJP. He became a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament) in 1994. In 1997 he was appointed president of the Uttar Pradesh branch of the BJP, and in late 1999 he was back in New Delhi as the minister of Surface Transport under the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. During his brief time with the ministry, an ambitious program was unveiled to expand the national highway network to better link India’s major urban areas.

In 2000 Singh became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, succeeding veteran leader Ram Prakash Gupta. His tenure in office lasted less than a year and a half, however, as he was forced to step down in early 2002 after the BJP lost control of the government in state assembly elections. He then moved back to the national stage. In 2003 he was appointed minister of agriculture (later agriculture and food processing), remaining there until the NDA lost control of the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) in 2004.

Singh was elected president of the BJP in December 2005 (taking office at the beginning of January 2006), with the stated purpose of bringing the party more into line with Hindutva principles—which sometimes put him at odds with the more-moderate members the party had recruited. He stepped down from the post in late 2009 after the party’s relatively poor showing in national parliamentary elections that year, although he won a seat in the Lok Sabha. He was again elected president of the BJP in early 2013, succeeding Nitin Gadkari, who had replaced him in 2009. Singh remained focused on religious issues—for example, staunchly advocating that a Hindu temple be built on the site of the 16th-century Babri Masjid (“Mosque of Bābur”) in Ayodhya that had been illegally demolished in 1992 by Hindu activists. He also stirred up controversy in 2013 when he stated that the use of English in India was undermining the country’s cultural values. Singh easily retained a seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections—part of a landslide BJP victory—and joined the cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as minister of home affairs. He held that post until 2019 when he became minister of defense.

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