Chaudhary Ajit Singh, the former Union minister and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief, died of COVID-19 on Thursday, his son and former MP Jayant Chaudhary said on Twitter. The RLD chief had tested positive for the disease on April 20 and was undergoing treatment at a Gurgaon hospital. He was 82.

Chaudhary Ajit Singh was the son of former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, who served as India’s leader between July 1979 and January 1980. 

Charan Singh was known as the champion of the peasants’ cause, a legacy that Ajit Singh nurtured.

His political journey began in 1986 when he got elected to the Rajya Sabha.  

Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 from Baghpat and was a minister in PM VP Singh’s cabinet. 

He was re-elected in 1991 and served as Minister of Food in PV Narasimha Rao’s cabinet.

Ajit Singh was re-elected to Parliament in 1996, as a Congress member, but resigned the same year.

He founded the RLD the next year and entered the Lok Sabha in a bye-election. Although he lost in 1998, Ajit Singh was re-elected three times after that, in 1999, 2004 and 2009.

He served as the minister of agriculture, from 2001 to 2003, in PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet. 

The RLD joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2011 and he served as the civil aviation minister in its cabinet.

Apart from politics, Ajit Singh was an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, where he did BTech in Computer Science, and MS from Illinois Institute of Technology. He worked for the tech company IBM in the 1960s.