Rise and fall of Capt’s right-hand man

Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 16

Rana Gurjit Singh, the richest candidate in last year’s Assembly elections with Rs 168-crore declared assets, belongs to a peasant family hailing from Bahar Majara village near Banga. In the 1950s, his family shifted to Bazpur (now in Uttarakhand), where he was born in 1956, and took thousands of acres on lease for farming. Bad in studies, Rana Gurjit was barely able to complete matriculation, said one of his close associates, who later parted ways with him.

He returned to Punjab in 1987, during the days of terrorism, and began buying land. First, he set up a paper mill near Kurali in Ropar, which was inaugurated by then Governor Siddhartha Shankar Ray. In the early 1990s, he started hobnobbing with Congress leaders. Then PPCC chief Beant Singh mediated to get him land at Buttar village in Amritsar district to set up a sugar mill, which played a key role in Rana’s meteoric rise. Soon, he was contributing funds for Beant Singh, who became the Chief Minister in 1992. Later, he opened Rana Polycot Limited near Lalru (Patiala).

Beant Singh’s assassination in 1995 was followed by Capt Amarinder Singh’s appointment as the PPCC chief. The latter’s first test was the Adampur byelection in 1998. Rana Gurjit came forward as a major fund-raiser for the Congress candidate, who stunned the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal’s nominee by a margin of just six votes.

In 2002, Rana Gurjit got the party ticket from the Kapurthala Assembly seat, a Congress bastion. He declared Rs 20-crore assets in that election, which he won by about 10,000 votes. Two years later, he defeated SAD stalwart Naresh Gujral to bag the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat.

Over the past decade or so, Rana Gurjit has established himself as Capt Amarinder’s right-hand man, standing by him despite the Assembly poll defeats of 2007 and 2012. He was the official incharge and main fund-raiser during the Amritsar Lok Sabha election in 2014, when Capt Amarinder humbled BJP heavyweight Arun Jaitley.

The Akalis wrested power from the Congress in 2007, but that didn’t affect Rana Gurjit’s fortunes. From bailouts by the government to his profit-earning units receiving benefits in the form of one-time settlement schemes, he got it all.

During the Akali-BJP rule (2012-17), his son, Rana Inder Partap Singh, gave a presentation at a Cabinet meeting on deciding a bailout for sugar mills. “It had perhaps never happened before that a businessman was allowed to enter the Cabinet meeting,” a senior journalist said.

From distilleries to polycot, power generation to leather industry, business in South Africa to foodgrains, Rana Gurjit and his family have a finger in virtually every pie. In the latest affidavit submitted to the Election Commission, he claimed to have shares in 10 companies dealing in various businesses. However, he ended up burning his fingers in the mining trade, months after taking charge as Power and Irrigation Minister.