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Who is Rajnath Singh?
A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veteran, Rajnath Singh has been serving as Defence Minister of India since 2019.
Throughout the first term of the Modi government (2014-19), Singh had been the Union home minister. He had also been the head of the BJP's manifesto drafting committee.
Currently, he is representing the Lucknow constituency in Lok Sabha.
Early life and education
Rajnath Singh was born on July 10, 1951 into a family of farmers in Bhabhuara village of Uttar Pradesh. He received his basic education in the village and subsequently, he completed his MSc Physics from Gorakhpur University. He worked as a lecturer of Physics at K B post-graduate college in Mirzapur.
Political career
Rajnath Singh started his career as a 'swayamsevak' of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He became the RSS 'Shakha Karyavah' (General Secretary) of Mirzapur in the year 1972. He was a student activist with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and went on to become the BJP National President and served the party in various capacities. He was elected to Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council in 1988 and became education minister of the state in 1991.
During his tenure as an education minister in UP, he made some landmark decisions like introducing the Anti Copying Act and Vedic Mathematics in the syllabus and correction of several distorted portions of history textbooks.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Rajnath Singh contested from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, a seat from where he had won the 2014 general elections, too. Singh beat Poonam Shatrughan Sinha of the Samajwadi Party (SP) by a margin of 347302 votes. He received 56.7% of the votes cast in the constituency.
In the previous National Democratic Alliance government, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh was the agriculture minister from 2003 to 2004. Before that, he had been the 19th chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (from October 28, 2000, to March 8, 2002).
Earlier, Singh had represented another UP seat of Ghaziabad (from May 16, 2009 to May 16, 2014).
Agnipath Scheme
The Defence Ministry, under Rajnath Singh, introduced Agnipath scheme, for recruitment of soldiers under the rank of commissioned officers. The recruitment was pursued for all the three forces, and the selected candidates were termed as 'Agniveers'.