Has Aitken’s girl split from Sikh warrior husband after three years of marriage?
IT was always an unlikely union – the former socialite daughter of a disgraced Tory minister and a Sikh warrior from the foothills of the Himalayas. Now the marriage between Alexandra Aitken and her Indian husband Inderjot Singh is said to be in trouble.
Family friends of the Aitkens say the couple have been spending long periods apart and that their relationship is effectively over.
And when questioned on her three-year marriage recently, Alexandra would only say: ‘God is my true love.’
Alexandra is one of three daughters of former treasury minister Jonathan Aitken, who was jailed for 18 months in 1999 for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
She was best known in her twenties for falling out of Mayfair nightclubs in revealing dresses and posing naked in GQ magazine. So it was a surprise in October 2010 when she married Mr Singh who is a mem-
‘God is my true love’
ber of the Nihangs, a distinguished Sikh warrior order. Alexandra, now 33, had moved to Amritsar in Northern India that year after apparently having a dream about a Sikh who would change her life.
She noticed law graduate Inderjot while practising yoga at the Golden Temple and spent a week beside him without exchanging a single word.
She later said she knew she was ‘blindly in love’ and returned to the city a few weeks later to be introduced to him.
Alexandra rapidly adopted Sikh traditions, refusing to cut her hair or even wax her eyebrows, using only a wooden comb and carrying a ceremonial knife.
The couple were married on October 28 at a temple in Rayya, a village just outside Amritsar.
Guests included her twin sister Victoria but she was sworn to secrecy and her parents were not told about the ceremony until later.
When news of her marriage broke, Alexandra admitted her father and mother were initially ‘shocked’ and ‘upset’. She revealed in an interview: ‘When I said, “Daddy, I might be wearing a turban next time you see me”, it was a bit of a shock.
‘But my father loves my husband – it’s impossible not to. He’s happy for us.’
Alexandra, who now uses the name Uttrang Kaur Khalsa, remains a devout follower of Sikhism but spent much of this year Italy, away from her husband. She is now thought to be back in India.
A friend of Alexandra’s twin sister said: ‘Victoria told me that the marriage had come to an end, and that they’re living separate lives.
‘But she didn’t know much more as she said it’s very hard to get hold of her sister these days.’
Asked by the Mail about her marriage at a Sikh conference in London where she was speaking during the summer, Alexandra became defensive and finally replied: ‘God is my true love.’ She told a newspaper at the weekend: ‘Many believe, don’t talk unless it improves on silence.’
A brother of Mr Singh, Jyoti Singh, said he did not believe the couple had separated but had very little contact with them and was uncertain of their current whereabouts.
Alexandra was photographed last year walking barefoot in India dressed in long traditional robes and clutching a spear in one hand and a bag of bananas in the other.
Speaking about that moment she first saw Mr Singh in 2011, she recalled: ‘I was sitting on the roof of the Golden Temple at about 3am, and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my whole life walked in.
‘He seemed 100 per cent man, gentle and intuitive and poetic and sensitive, but also extraordinarily strong and manly.
‘And you don’t see many of these around. So I was like: “Oh wow!”’