Former Punjab chief minister and leader of the Punjab Lok Congress Amarinder Singh will be joining the Bharatiya Janata Party next week, a party spokesperson told the Times of India. 

The former Congress member quit last year following his unceremonious exit as Punjab’s chief minister. In his stead, Charanjit Singh Channi took over the chief minister. Singh will be merging his newly formed party with the BJP. Next week, the 80-year-old will make the transfer official in the presence of party president JP Nadda in Delhi. 

Singh’s announcement comes weeks after he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. 

Who is Preneet Kaur?

Preneet Kaur is a politician who served as a Minister of State in the Ministry of External affairs from 2009 to 2014. She is the wife of Amarinder Singh. 

She was born on October 3, 1944 in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. She did most of her schooling there, attending the St. Bede’s College and then graduating from The Convent of Jesus and Mary.Prior to her entry into politics, she ran a school by the name of Sanjeevani, a home for differently abled children.

In 1999, she ran under the Congress banner during the general elections from the Patiala Lok Sabha constituency. Though she won her seat, the party lost. In the general elections in 2004, Congress formed the government, with Kaur retaining her seat. 

During the 2009 elections, having won the Patiala seat three times in a row, she was made a Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs. However, in the following 2014 general elections, she lost her seat to the Aam Aadmi Party candidate Dharamvir Gandhi, by a margin of 20,942 votes. 

Kaur stepped forward as the owner of a Swiss bank account shortly after the BJP government submitted a list of names of people who owned of such accounts to the Supreme Court.