Vishvjit Prithvijit Singh (29 October 1946 - 6 August 2017) was an Indian politician with theIndian National Congress party. He is a great-grandson ofPratap Singh of Kapurthala.[1]
Singh was born on 29 October 1946 at Kapurthala House, Jalandhar, to father Kanwar Ranjit Singh and Mother Kanwarani Anjana Singh of Kapurthala, and was later adopted by Kanwarani Surjit Kaur, the widow of Captain Kanwar Prithvijit Singh of Kapurthala. He studied atThe Doon School, Dehra Dun (I.S.C.).[2] He was first elected to theRajya Sabha (the Upper House of the Indian Parliament) in April 1982, representing the State ofMaharashtra. He returned for a second term from April 1988 to April 1994.[3]
In 1989, he married KanwaraniVijay Thakur Singh, who is a diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service and is currently serving at theMinistry of External Affairs, India as Secretary (East).[4]
Singh has been a delegate to several International Conferences as well as to the United Nations General Assembly a number of times. He has been a member of numerous committees of the Indian Parliament and has also done work in the field of perspective planning. He has written extensively in magazines and newspapers on issues mainly related to planning perspectives.
As chairman of his party's computer department, Singh has also driven initiatives to make more use of technology in election efforts, including putting publicity material, speeches and posters online, installing servers, setting up SMS software to facilitate the sending of bulk SMSs, and establishing a support team.[5][6]
Singh supports dividing the larger Indian states into smaller units.[7]
In 2010, he wrote a book of Hindi poetry entitledKuch Shabd Kuch Lakeerein, published by Yatra Books, the Hindi imprint of Penguin India. The book was released at the Doon Literary Festival in April 2010.[8]
In 1994, Singh was investigated, along with many other members of the Upper House of the Indian Parliament including the current Prime Minister of India, for seeking election from a state of which he was supposedly not a resident[citation needed] byChief Election CommissionerT. N. Seshan. However, he expressed grudging admiration for the results Seshan achieved in ensuring free and fair elections in which all parties followed the rules.[9] The matter regarding the anomaly in the law was finally settled by an amendment to the law and all these prosecutions have lapsed.[10][original research?]
Singh has been overweight since childhood. Upon his election to Parliament, then-Prime MinisterIndira Gandhi orderedArun Nehru to help him lose weight as Singh weighed almost 160 kg; his weight dropped to as low as 108 kg once while he was hospitalised for a heart attack, but his weight increased again after the hospitalisation.[11]