PATIALA
: Senior Akali leader, five-time legislator of
Chamkaur Sahib
, and twice Punjab cabinet minister,
Satwant Kaur Sandhu
, died at a private hospital in Mohali on Friday night after a fortnight of fighting Covid-19. She was 80.
She had first served as a minister for social welfare and public health, while from 2000 to 2002, held the charge of grievances and pensions, youth services, and printing and stationery. She would have turned 81 on February 22. Her son, Harmohan Singh Sandhu, who quit as AIG to join the Shiromani Akali Dal in 2019, said: “My mother was in public life since 1975. She was now chairperson of the party’s women’s and Scheduled Caste wings. In 1987, she was chairperson of Punjab Leather Corporation.”
She joined politics after losing her husband in 1974. Twice elected as MLA in 1962 and 1972, he had also remained Punjab’s deputy leader of the opposition. Satwant Kaur was cremated on Saturday. In Chandigarh, former chief minister and SAD patron Parkash Singh Badal, besides party president
Sukhbir Singh Badal, expressed grief at her death. Parkash Singh Badal remembered her as “a committed social activist of Chamkaur Sahib, who worked for the downtrodden”. The SAD president, in his condolence message, recalled her as a loyal party worker who upheld Panthic principles in public life.
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