Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced Sunday that her father had died.
In a Father's Day post on X. Haley wrote of Ajit Singh Randhawa, "This morning I had to say goodbye to the smartest, sweetest, kindest, most decent man I have ever known."
Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations who ran for president as a GOP candidate earlier this year, added: "My heart is heavy knowing he is gone. He taught his kids the importance of faith, hard work, and grace. He was an amazing husband of 64 years, a loving grandfather and great grandfather, and the best father to his four children. He was such a blessing to all of us."
She did not specify his age or his cause of death.
In January, Haley had paused her campaign briefly to visit her father in a hospital in South Carolina. At the time, it was widely reported he had been diagnosed with an unspecified type of cancer.
Haley was born in 1972 in South Carolina, but her father emigrated from their native India in 1969.
In February 2023, a POLITICO fact sheet about Haley described her parents: "Her father, Ajit Singh Randhawa, from the Punjab region of India, got a master’s degree in biology before moving to Canada to get a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. In 1969, he landed in small, segregated Bamberg, S.C., to teach at Voorhees College, a nearby HBCU. Her mother, Raj Kaur Randhawa, also from the Punjab region, grew up in a wealthy family in a big house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikhs; earned a law degree, highly unusual for a woman in that place and time; and began in South Carolina by teaching sixth-grade social studies in the local public schools before starting a gift shop she turned into a million-dollar fashion boutique. He wore a turban. She wore a sari and a bindi. 'My parents,” Nikki Haley has said, “were more American than anyone I knew.'''
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