Swaran Singh was born at Shankar in Jalandhar district in 1907 and held more central ministerial portfolios than almost anyone in independent India: defence, external affairs, agriculture, food, railways, steel and others, across roughly a quarter of a century.
He led India's delegation to the United Nations Security Council during the 1971 war and conducted a large part of the diplomacy around it.
He chaired the committee whose recommendations led to the constitutional amendments of 1976, including the Fundamental Duties, and it carries his name, though most people have never connected it to a Punjabi politician.
He was a Sikh in the central cabinet through the entire period in which Punjab's relationship with the centre deteriorated, and he was consistently on the accommodating side of that argument.
He is one of the longest-serving Indian cabinet ministers of the twentieth century and is almost completely forgotten in Punjab.
He was a lawyer from Jalandhar who came into politics through the Akali Dal and the Sikh politics of the 1940s, sat in the pre-partition Punjab cabinet, and moved into Congress after independence. The route from a Panthic base to a Delhi cabinet is one very few people have made work.
He was dropped from the cabinet in 1975 and lost his seat in 1977. Outside Punjab he is remembered for a committee report. What he is not remembered for anywhere is that he sat in the room for the negotiations over Punjab's own settlement more than once and took the centre's side each time.
Shankar in Jalandhar district has a memorial and a college carrying his name. Beyond that he is a road in Delhi and a footnote in the accounts of 1971. A man who sat in the union cabinet for the better part of twenty five years has left less behind in Punjab than a district level leader from the same decade.