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Zail Singh

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Zail Singh

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Also known as Gyani Zail Singh

President of India from 1982 to 1987

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Giani Zail Singh (1916–1994) was an Indian politician and freedom fighter who served as the President of India. A member of the Indian National Congress, he also held the positions of Chief Minister of Punjab, Minister of Home Affairs, and Member of the Lok Sabha. Born in the British Raj, he later held citizenship in the Dominion of India and India. He was a candidate in the 1982 Indian presidential election.

Singh was a Sikh who spoke Hindi. He authored two works, including *Memoirs of Giani Zail Singh* and *Speeches of President Giani Zail Singh*. His musical output included ghazals. He died in Chandigarh following a traffic collision.

Synthesized by Vinony from 26 facts across 5 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Crossref, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

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Encyclopedic overview

Giani Zail Singh (pronunciation, born Jarnail Singh; 5 May 1916 – 25 December 1994) was an Indian politician who served as President of India from 1982 to 1987 and chief minister of Punjab in the 1970s. He was the first Sikh to become president.

Born in Sandhwan in the princely state of Faridkot, Singh trained to be a granthi and was given the title of giani, meaning a learned man, while training at the Sikh Missionary School in Amritsar. Singh was associated with peasant agitations and the movement seeking a representative government in Faridkot. His political activism in the Praja Mandal, an organisation allied with the Indian National Congress, saw him sentenced to solitary confinement between 1938 and 1943. He led a flag satyagraha and formed a parallel government in Faridkot State which were called off only after the intervention of Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. The stints in jail inspired him to change his name to Zail Singh.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Zail Singh” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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