Finally set to join BJP and re-contest from her Patiala seat, Preneet Kaur may face a tough fight

Preneet Kaur, suspended Congress MP and wife of former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, will formally join the BJP on Thursday, and is set to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from the family’s pocketborough of Patiala as the BJP candidate.

Kaur (79), a four-time MP and a former Union Minister of State for External Affairs, was suspended by the Congress in February last year for helping her husband, who quit the Congress after being removed as CM, and formed the Punjab Lok Congress before merging it with the BJP.

While the only Opposition MP in the Lok Sabha Ethics Panel, which looked into the cash-for-query case against Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, Kaur had voted with the government, supporting Moitra’s expulsion.

An alumna of St Bede’s College in Shimla, Kaur is the daughter of Gian Singh Kahlon, a former chief secretary of Punjab and an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer of the British era. She got married to Amarinder, a scion of the erstwhile royal family of Patiala, in October 1964. She ran an NGO named Sanjeevani for differently abled children when she contested and won the Patiala Lok Sabha seat in 1999, on the Congress ticket.

Kaur has won the seat four times since, except in 2014, when she lost to Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Dharamvira Gandhi. After Amarinder won from the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in 2014, and vacated her Patiala (Urban) Assembly constituency, Kaur had fought the bypoll and won.

Kaur is known to be soft-spoken, and a leader with deep grass-roots connections in her Lok Sabha constituency, who knows people by their names and participates in the weddings and other ceremonies of family members of party leaders and workers. This is in contrast to Amarinder, who is seen as inaccessible by party