Bhagat Chunni Lal

Bhagat Chunni Lal was a Punjab politician, sports goods businessman and long serving Bharatiya Janata Party organiser whose public life ran from the Jana Sangh years of the 1960s through three terms in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha and a cabinet seat in the Shiromani Akali Dal BJP coalition governments of Parkash Singh Badal. He died in Jalandhar on 10 September 2026 at the age of 93, after years of ill health. The Punjab government declared a half day holiday, and his son Mohinder Bhagat, a cabinet minister in the Aam Aadmi Party government, announced the family's loss.

He was born on 1 December 1932 in Sialkot, then in undivided Punjab and now in Pakistan. After Partition his family settled in Jalandhar, where he built a sports goods manufacturing and export business and entered local politics as one of the early Bhagat community leaders to throw in with the Jana Sangh. He contested Assembly elections from Jalandhar South for the Jana Sangh in 1967 and 1969, stood as an independent in 1985, and stayed with the organisation as it became the BJP, taking party roles through the 1980s and 1990s while his influence in Jalandhar West politics grew.

The breakthrough came in 1997, when he won Jalandhar South for the BJP and entered the Assembly for the first time. He lost in 2002, returned in 2007 from the same seat, and was made minister for Medical Education and Research in the SAD BJP government. In 2011 he was elected Deputy Speaker of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha. After delimitation he won the new Jalandhar West seat in 2012 and served as a cabinet minister with portfolios that included Local Government (Local Bodies), Medical Education and Research, Forests and Wildlife, and Labour. He also led the BJP Legislature Party. In 2017, citing age, he stepped aside and the BJP fielded his son Mohinder from Jalandhar West.

Even after Mohinder later joined the Aam Aadmi Party, Chunni Lal described himself as loyal to the BJP, saying he had learned politics in that party and would not leave it. He is survived by four sons and four daughters. His grandson Krish Bhagat has played cricket, including for the Mumbai Indians. Final rites were held on 10 September 2026 at the Model House Road cremation ground in Basti Sheikh, Jalandhar. Tributes followed from across party lines, including from AAP leaders who attended the family's ceremonies in the days after his death.