Sardar Swaran Singh (19 August 1907 – 30 October 1994) was an Indian politician. He was India's longest-serving union cabinet minister. Early life Swaran Singh Purewal was born on 19 August 1907 in Shankar (village) in Jalandhar district of Punjab. He was born in Jat Sikh family. He completed his intermediate (High school) at Randhir College in Kapurthala. He then joined Government College, Lahore and completed a degree in Physics with honors. He then worked as a lecturer in Physics in Lyallpur Khalsa College. After leaving this job he studied law in Government law college in Lahore and received his L.L.B in 1932. He started a law practice near his birth village in the nearby town of Jallandhar, specialising in criminal law. Political career The early days In 1930s he joined the Akali Dal political party and by the mid forties he was a prominent leader in the mid-1940s. He played an important role in the compromise between the Indian national congress party and the Akali Dal in the early 1940s. Just before the 1946 elections, the Panthic Party was formed with Baldev Singh as the leader and Singh was elected its deputy leader. In 1946 he was elected a member of the Punjab legislative assembly. He then became parliamentary secretary to the Punjab Coalition government. He was a member of the Punjab Partition Committee where he played an important role. On 15 August 1947, the day of Indian Independence he was sworn in as Home Minister in the cabinet of the state of Punjab. At the same time the capital of the Punjab was shifted from Shimla to Jalandhar. On 13 May 1952 he resigned his position here when Jawaharlal Nehru included him in the central cabinet. In the central government He entered the cabinet of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1952, and was that government's last surviving member. He spent 23 years of his life as a high ranking Cabinet Minister in the Government of India. He had a reputation for being an effective debater and negotiator. "His debates at the UN Security Council on Bangladesh's cause, when East Pakistan liberation war (1971) was in full swing, were impressive," attests Former Indian ambassador to the United Nations, Narendra P Jain, "He proved to be more than just a match for his then Pakistani counterpart Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. During one of the council debates when Bhutto said