Vishvjit Singh
Vishvjit Prithvijit Singh (29 October 1946 - 6 August 2017) was an Indian politician with the Indian National Congress party. He is a great grandson of Col the Honourable Pratap Singh of Kapurthala. Biography. 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 at The Doon School, Dehra Dun (I.S.C.). He was first elected to the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House of the Indian Parliament) in  April 1982, representing the State of Maharashtra. He returned for a second term in April 1988. In 1989, he married Kanwarani Vijay Thakur Singh, who is a diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service and is currently serving at the Ministry of External Affairs, India as Secretary (East). 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. Singh supports dividing the larger Indian states into smaller units. In 2010, he wrote a book of Hindi poetry entitled "Kuch 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. Controversies. 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 by Chief Election Commissioner T. 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. The matter regarding the anomaly in the law was finally settled by an amendment to the law and all these prosecutions have lapsed. Health issues. Singh has been overweight  ever since childhood. Upon his election to Parliament, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Arun Nehru to help him lose weight, as he was nearly 160 kg; his weight dropped to as low as 108 kg once while he was hospitalised for a heart attack, but increased again soon afterward.