Sandhwan, a village in what was then the princely state of Faridkot and is now Faridkot district of Punjab, was the birthplace on 5 May 1916 of a carpenter's son named Jarnail Singh. Sixty-six years later he took the oath as the seventh President of India, the first Sikh and the first person from an artisan background to hold the office. By then he was known universally as Giani Zail Singh, and he presided over five of the most turbulent years in the country's history.

Faridkot and the Praja Mandal

Zail Singh was born into a family of modest means in the Ramgarhia carpenter community. His formal education came at the Shaheed Sikh Missionary College in Amritsar, where he studied Sikh scripture and theology and earned the title Giani, denoting a learned reader of the Guru Granth Sahib. The title stuck for life and became part of his name in public usage.

Politics reached him early. The princely states of Punjab were governed autocratically and were largely insulated from the reforms taking place in British-administered provinces. In 1938 he helped found the Praja Mandal in Faridkot, a movement demanding representative government within the state. The ruler responded by jailing him. He was imprisoned between 1938 and 1943, including a long stretch in solitary confinement, and it was during this period that he changed his name from Jarnail to Zail. He led a flag satyagraha in 1946 and, in 1948, declared a parallel administration in defiance of the Faridkot durbar.

Punjab, and the chief ministership

After independence and the merger of the Punjab princely states into PEPSU, Zail Singh entered government as a minister in the new arrangement, and subsequently built a long career in the Congress party in Punjab. He served as president of the state Congress unit and was elected to the legislature.

He became Chief Minister of Punjab on 17 March 1972 and held the office until 30 April 1977. His tenure was notable for a deliberate and heavily promoted engagement with Sikh religious symbolism and history: he had roads and institutions named for the Gurus, and organised large-scale commemorations, including the marking of a route associated with Guru Gobind Singh. Critics argued that this was an attempt to compete with the Akali Dal on its own ground; supporters saw it as overdue official recognition of Sikh heritage. He also oversaw significant rural development and electrification work in a state then in the middle of the Green Revolution.

From 14 January 1980 to 22 June 1982 he served as Union Minister of Home Affairs in Indira Gandhi's government, the senior domestic portfolio in the Indian cabinet.

President of India, 1982 to 1987

Zail Singh was elected President and took office on 25 July 1982. His term coincided with the gravest internal crisis India had faced since independence.

In June 1984 the government ordered Operation Blue Star, the army assault on the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar. Zail Singh, as a devout Sikh and as head of state, was placed in an impossible position; he was not consulted in advance in any meaningful way, and he visited the damaged complex shortly afterwards.
On 31 October 1984 Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Zail Singh returned to Delhi and swore in Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister within hours.
The days that followed saw organised anti-Sikh violence in Delhi and elsewhere in which thousands were killed. Zail Singh's inability, as President, to halt it was a source of lasting anguish to him and of lasting criticism of the office.

The later part of his term was defined by a deteriorating relationship with Rajiv Gandhi's government. The most significant constitutional episode came in 1986, when Parliament passed the Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill, which would have expanded the state's power to intercept mail. Zail Singh neither signed the bill nor formally returned it. By simply declining to act, he prevented it from becoming law — the clearest exercise of a pocket veto in Indian presidential history, and a precedent still cited in constitutional argument about the limits of the office.

He left office on 25 July 1987.

Death and legacy

On 29 November 1994 Zail Singh was severely injured when the car he was travelling in collided with a truck near Kiratpur Sahib in Punjab. He died from those injuries on 25 December 1994, aged seventy-eight. He is commemorated at Ekta Sthal in Delhi.

Assessments of him remain divided. He was criticised for personal loyalty to the Gandhi family that at times sat awkwardly with the independence of the offices he held. He was equally credited with a genuine common touch, an unforced fluency in the language and idiom of rural Punjab, and the courage to use presidential power against an overwhelming parliamentary majority when he judged a law to be wrong.

For Sandhwan and for Faridkot, the significance is simpler and not in dispute. A boy from a carpenter's household in a princely-state village, jailed at twenty-two for demanding an elected government, ended his career as the constitutional head of the Republic of India.