Biography
Prof. Satyapal Singh Baghel, recorded in the Lok Sabha as “Prof. S P Singh Baghel”, has been elected to the Lok Sabha five times and has also sat in the Rajya Sabha and the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. Since July 2021 he has been a Union Minister of State.
The biography in layers
He was born in a village in western Uttar Pradesh and studied in Madhya Pradesh and Meerut. Before he entered electoral politics he served as a police officer and later taught at a college in Agra. Each layer below covers one stage, with the record it comes from.
1960Origins
The Lok Sabha record gives his birthplace as Bhatpura, post office Umari, District Auraiya. In 1960 the area was part of Etawah district. Auraiya became a separate district on 17 September 1997, created from the Auraiya and Bidhuna tehsils of Etawah. His 2024 election affidavit lists inherited agricultural land in the same village.
1982–2013Education
He took an M.Sc. in Military Science (1982, Jiwaji University, Gwalior) and an LL.B. (1987, Meerut). He completed a Ph.D. at Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, in 2004, during his third Lok Sabha term. In 2013 he added an M.A. in History from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Agra.
EarlierService
A PTI report of February 2022 describes him as someone “who as a police officer served in the security of former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and who also brought him into politics.” The official Lok Sabha profile does not mention police service, and his years of service are not on the public record.
1996–2014First era
Election Commission records show his first Lok Sabha contest in 1996, in Jalesar for the Bahujan Samaj Party, which he lost. He won the same seat for the Samajwadi Party in 1998, 1999 and 2004. Jalesar was abolished as a Lok Sabha seat in the 2008 delimitation. He then contested Firozabad for the BSP in 2009, and sat in the Rajya Sabha from July 2010 to March 2014.
2014–2019Second era
He stood for the BJP in Firozabad in 2014 and lost. In July 2015 he was named national president of the BJP’s OBC Morcha. In 2017 he won the Tundla (SC) Assembly seat and joined Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s cabinet, with charge of animal husbandry, fisheries and minor irrigation.
2019–nowAgra
He won Agra (SC) in 2019 with 56.48% of the vote and resigned his Assembly seat. On 7 July 2021 he was sworn in as Union Minister of State for Law and Justice, and in May 2023 he moved to Health and Family Welfare. Re-elected from Agra in 2024, he has since served as Minister of State in both the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry & Dairying and the Ministry of Panchayati Raj.
BeyondInterests
In his parliamentary profile he lists writing poetry, reading literature, and Indian folk and devotional music among his interests. For sport he names cricket, football, volleyball, shooting and athletics, and records that he captained the cricket team of Government Nehru Degree College, Ashok Nagar, Madhya Pradesh, in 1980. The same profile notes that he played a police inspector in the television serial Yeh Kaisa Mission.