Digvijaya Singh is an Indian politician and a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha. He is Ex-General Secretary of the Indian National Congress party's All India Congress Committee. Previously, he had served as the 14th Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, a central Indian state, for two terms from 1993 to 2003. Prior to that he was a minister in Chief Minister Arjun Singh's cabinet between 1980 and 1984. In 2019 Lok Sabha elections he was defeated by Pragya Singh Thakur for Bhopal Lok Sabha seat.
Singh was born in Indore in the erstwhile princely state of Holkar (now a part of Madhya Pradesh) of British India, on 28 February 1947. His father, Balbhadra Singh, was the Raja of Raghogarh (under Gwalior State), presently known as Guna district of Madhya Pradesh, and a member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) as independent candidate for the Raghogarh Vidhan Sabha constituency following the 1951 elections. He was educated at The Daly College, Indore and the Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science (SGSITS) Indore, where he completed his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering.
Since 1969, he was married to Asha Singh, who died in 2013, and with whom he has four daughters and a son Jaivardhan Singh, who was member of Madhya Pradesh's 14th Vidhan Sabha serving as the Cabinet Minister of Urban Development and Housing. In April 2014, he confirmed that he was in a relationship with a Rajya Sabha TV anchor Amrita Rai; they married in late August 2015.
The sacred Narmada River, the lifeline of Central India, is worshipped as Narmada maiyya (mother) or Ma Rewa (derived from тАЬrevтАЭ meaning leaping one). One of the five holy rivers of India, it is the only one which has the tradition of being circumambulated from source to sea and back, on a pilgrimage or yatra.
Being the longest west-flowing river, the Narmada parikrama is a formidable spiritual exercise and challengeтАФan incredible journey of about 3,300 km.
Digvijaya Singh along with his wife started the Narmada Parikrama on 30 September 2017, from Barman Ghat, on banks of river Narmada after taking the blessing of his spiritual guru Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati. The journey took them from Barman Ghat, on River Narmada southern banks, all the way to its mouth at Bharuch in Gujarat. At Bharuch, Mithi Talai is the point where the Narmada joins the Arabian Sea. Here they took a motorboat from the southern to the northern end and begin the return journey along its northern bank. On 9 April 2018 they completed the narmada parikrama at Barman Ghat having covered 3,300 kilometres (2,100 mi) by foot in 192 days.
In 1998, 19 to 24 farmers were shot dead by Madhya Pradesh police. Singh was Chief Minister of the state at the time and the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) blamed him for arresting farmers' leaders.
A comment by Singh in 2011 led to disagreements within his party. He stated that the Batla House encounter case, which led to the death of two terrorists and one police officer, was fake. The Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, dismissed Singh's claim and his demand for a further judicial investigation into it. Congress rejected his views that the encounter was stage-managed, stating that the encounter should not be politicised or raked up for political gains. Singh's stand on the Batla House encounter led to criticism from the opposition BJP.
In 2013, Singh described Meenakshi Natarajan, a female Congress MP from Mandsaur, as "sau tunch maal" ("totally unblemished")тАФa colloquialism The Times of India described as "frequently used loosely to describe a woman as 'sexy'". Advocates for women's rights were upset by Singh's comment and called for Congress to act against him. However, the MP backed Singh and said he meant that she was like "pure gold"; The Times of India commented that "tunch maal" is "also a trade jargon among jewelers to describe the level of purity of the yellow metal" and added that Singh prefaced his comment about Natarajan by describing himself as a "political goldsmith".
Singh criticised the United States in 2011 for not respecting Osama bin Laden's religion when it buried him at sea, saying "however big a criminal one might be, his religious traditions should be respected while burying him." Congress's leadership distanced itself from his views. Singh later said that his statement should not be interpreted as support for or opposition to bin Laden, adding "I had merely said that the worst of criminals should be cremated according to their faith. He is a terrorist and he deserved the treatment that he got."
In March 2022, Digvijay Singh along with six others was sentenced for one year rigorous imprisonment by an Indore court in connection with clash with BJYM workers in 2011.
Singh has said that the right-wing extremism of the kind he said is perpetrated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) represented a grave threat to national unity. He equated RSS to the Nazis stating that "The RSS, in the garb of its nationalist ideology, is targeting Muslims the same way Nazis targeted Jews in the 1930s". Israel had taken grave exception to this comment. He falsely accused the RSS of being involved in a number of terrorist strikes including the Mumbai terror attacks. He demanded a CBI enquiry into the murder of Sunil Joshi, an RSS activist accused of being involved in the Ajmer Dargah attack, alleging that Joshi was murdered because "he knew too much".
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