Karan Singh

Karan Singh (born 9 March 1931) is an Indian politician and philosopher. He is the titular Maharaja of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. From 1952 to 1965 he was the Sadr-i-Riyasat (President) of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. He is the chairperson trustee of the Dharmarth Trust of Jammu and Kashmir which maintains 175 temples in north India and works in other areas such as historical preservation.

Singh was a member of India's Upper House of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, representing the national capital territory of Delhi. He is a senior member of the Indian National Congress party who served successively as President (Sadr-i-Riyasat) and Governor of the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. He was a life trustee and president of India International Centre. He was elected chancellor of Banaras Hindu University for three terms until 2018 when he was succeeded by Giridhar Malaviya. He has been a prospective presidential candidate over the years.

Yuvraj Karan Singh was born at the Martinez Hotel, Cannes, France, into the Dogra dynasty. He was the only son of Sir Hari Singh, Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. His mother, Maharani Tara Devi, who was the fourth wife of his father, was the daughter of a landowning Katoch Rajput family and came from (Vijaypur near Bilaspur) in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh.^{[dubious – discuss][citation needed]}

Singh was educated at Doon School, Dehradun, a boarding school, which represented a departure from the usual practise of princes being educated by tutors at home. The school was very elite, but it nevertheless meant that Karan Singh shared the classroom (though not the hostel) with boys from non-royal backgrounds, and received a standard education. Unusually for the scion of an Indian royal family, he then enrolled in a college for a graduate degree, receiving first a B.A. degree from Jammu and Kashmir University, Srinagar, and subsequently an M.A. degree in Political Science and a PhD from University of Delhi.

In 1950, the 19-year-old Karan Singh was married to 13-year-old Yasho Rajya Lakshmi, granddaughter of Mohan Shumsher Rana, Maharajah of Nepal, belonging to the Rana dynasty of Nepal. Her father, General Maharajkumar Sharada Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, was a son of Mohan Shumsher. The match, arranged by their families in the usual Indian way, lasted all their lives. The couple had three children:

In the early 1960s, he took initiation from Sri Madhava Ashish, a disciple of Sri Krishna Prem of the Mirtola ashram.

In 1949, at age of eighteen, Singh was appointed as the Prince Regent of Jammu and Kashmir state after his father stepped down as the ruler, following the state's accession to India. From that point, he served successively as regent, the Sadr-i-Riyasat, and the first governor of the state of Jammu and Kashmir from 1965 to 1967.

On 8 August 1953 as the President (Sadr-i-Riyasat) of Jammu and Kashmir, Karan Singh backed a coup d'etat against the elected Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah,^{[citation needed]} allegedly for harboring independent ambitions for Kashmir, which led to the imprisonment of Abdullah for eleven years following the Kashmir Conspiracy Case.