Karan Singh was born in Cannes, France into the Dogra dynasty. He was the only son of Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruling Maharaja of Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir. His mother, Maharani Tara Devi, who was the fourth wife of his father, was the daughter of a landowning KatochRajput family and came from Bijapur in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Singh was educated at Doon School, Dehra Dun, 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 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 degree from University of Delhi. In 1950, the 19-year-old Karan Singh was married to 13-year-old Yasho Rajya Lakshmi, daughter of a nobleman belonging to the Rana family of Nepal. Her father, General Sharada Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, was a senior army officer and the son of Mohan Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana, the last Rana Prime Minister of Nepal. The match, arranged by their families in the usual Indian way, was entirely harmonious and lasted all their lives. The couple were blessed with three children:
Ajatshatru Singh, second son; took to politics, was elected to the state assembly from the Nagrota constituency and became a minister in the state government. His wife is the daughter of an army officer.
Jyotsna Singh, only daughter, married into a chauhan family belonging to Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh.
Political career
In 1949, at age of eighteen, Singh was appointed as the 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. In 1967, he resigned as Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, and became the youngest-ever member of the Union Cabinet, holding the portfolios of Tourism and Civil Aviation between 1967 and 1973. Two years later, he voluntarily surrendered his privy purse, which he had been entitled to since the death of his father in 1961. He placed the entire sum into a charitable trust named after his parents. In 1971, he was sent as an envoy to the Eastern Bloc nations to explain India's position with regard to East Pakistan, then engaged in civil war with West Pakistan. He attempted to resign following an aircraft crash in 1973, but the resignation was not accepted. The same year, he became the Minister for Health and Family planning, serving in this post until 1977. Following the Emergency, Karan Singh was elected to the Lok Sabha from Udhampur in 1977 on a Congress ticket , and became Minister of Education and Culture in 1979 as part of Charan Singh's cabinet, representing Congress, which had split from Indira's Congress. He contested the 1980 Lok Sabha election on a Congress ticket and won. In 1989–1990, he served as Indian Ambassador to the US, and this experience became the subject of a book he wrote, "Brief Sojourn". From 1967 to 1984 Karan Singh was a member of the Lok Sabha. In 1984, he contested the Lok Sabha polls as an independent candidate from Jammu but lost the election. He was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 30 November 1996 to 12 August 1999, representing National Conference, a Muslim dominated party active in Jammu and Kashmir. Later, he was a Rajya Sabha member from 28 January 2000 to 27 January 2018 representing INC. He has served as Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, Jammu and Kashmir University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and NIIT University.
On population
"In 1974, I led the Indian delegation to the World Population Conference in Bucharest, where my statement that 'development is the best contraceptive' became widely known and oft quoted. I must admit that 20 years later I am inclined to reverse this, and my position now is that 'contraception is the best development'.”
Academic career
Karan Singh served as the chancellor of Banaras Hindu University for three terms up till 2018. In 2008, he awarded an honorary doctorate to then prime minister Manmohan Singh, and in 2016, he was asked by university administration to award an honorary doctorate to prime minister Modi, that the prime minister declined.
