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Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Ajit Singh was on Sunday inducted into the Union Cabinet, a day ahead of the start of the monsoon session of Parliament.
President K R Narayanan administered the oath of office and secrecy to Singh at a brief function at the Rashtrapati Bhawan.
An engineer who worked in the computer industry in the US for 17 years, Ajit Singh plunged into politics in the late eightees, hopping from one party to another even as he formed his own.
Singh, 62, first entered Parliament as a Rajya Sabha member in 1986, and is a fourth time member of the Lok Sabha.
Son of former prime minister and Jat leader Charan Singh, Ajit Singh became a Union minister for the first time in 1989-90 when he was inducted into National Front government of Vishwanath Pratap Singh. He went on to become the food minister under the Congress government (1995-96) when P V Narasimha Rao was the prime minister.
Singh formed his own faction of the Lok Dal called Lok Dal (Ajit) in 1987 and a year later merged it with the Janata Party of which he became the president.
When Janata Dal was formed by a merger of the Janata Party, Lok Dal (B) and Jan Morcha, Singh was elected its secretary general. He was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 and re-elected in 1991.
In the mid-nineties, he moved to the Congress with a large slice of the Janata Dal MPs.
After winning the 1996 Lok Sabha poll in 1996 on a Congress ticket, he left the party within a year to form the Bharatiya Kisan Kamgar Party. He resigned from the Lok Sabha membership and contested the by-election as a BKKP candidate in Baghpat, defeating his Samajwadi Party rival.
Singh lost the 1998 election to Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Som Pal but avenged the defeat in 1999 as an Rashtriya Lol Dal member.
Born on February 12, 1939, Singh did his Bsc, B Tech and MS from the Lucknow University, IIT Kharagpur and Illinois Institute of Technology, USA.
Singh has a special interest in agriculture and modern technology.
Married to Radhika, he has one son and two daughters.
PTI
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