Some careers turn on a single over. Harbhajan Singh's turned on three balls, bowled on the opening morning of a Test match at Eden Gardens in March 2001, when a struggling twenty-year-old off-spinner who had been in and out of the Indian side dismissed three of the best batsmen Australia has produced in successive deliveries. He was, by his own later account, a different bowler and a different public figure by lunch. Everything that followed — the World Cups, the long and combative IPL career, the diplomatic incidents, the eventual move into politics — runs off from that morning.
Jalandhar
He was born in Jalandhar, Punjab, on 3 July 1980, the only son among six children of Sardev Singh, who ran a ball-bearing and valve factory. His father wanted him focused on cricket rather than the family business, and Harbhajan made his India debut in both Tests and one-day internationals in 1998, while still a teenager, without immediately establishing himself. For three years he was a fringe figure, in occasional trouble with national selectors over his action and his form, before Kolkata changed the calculus.
The Hat-Trick
On 11 March 2001, in the second Test of Australia's tour of India, Harbhajan dismissed Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne in three consecutive deliveries — the first hat-trick taken by an Indian bowler in Test history. He finished the innings with seven wickets. Australia, unbeaten in sixteen consecutive Tests coming in, still made 445 and enforced the follow-on after India collapsed for 171. What happened next has its own separate legend: VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid batted through most of two days for a stand of 376, Laxman making 281, before Harbhajan came back to take six more wickets and bowl India to victory by 171 runs — only the third instance in Test history of a team winning after following on. His match figures were 13 for 196. India went on to win the series 2-1 having trailed 1-0, with Harbhajan taking 32 wickets across the three Tests, the platform on which his entire career was built.
World Cups and the IPL
He became a fixture of the Indian side across three formats for the next decade and a half, finishing with 417 Test wickets, 269 in one-day internationals, and 707 international wickets overall — the second-highest tally by any Indian bowler. He was part of the squads that won the 2002 Champions Trophy, the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007, and the 2011 ODI World Cup on home soil, the tournament that remains the high-water mark of that Indian generation. In the Indian Premier League he was bought by Mumbai Indians in the competition's first auction in 2008 and stayed with the franchise for a decade, before shorter spells at Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders took him through to his final appearances in 2021.
Monkeygate and Slapgate
His on-field temperament made him as often a subject of controversy as of admiration. In January 2008, during the Sydney Test, Andrew Symonds accused him of directing a racial slur at him — a saga the press quickly dubbed "Monkeygate" — and Harbhajan was banned for three Tests by the match referee, a punishment India's board fought and eventually had overturned on appeal. Harbhajan maintained throughout that he had used a Hindi insult, not the word attributed to him. The two men later made peace; Harbhajan has described a long, emotional reconciliation before they became Mumbai Indians teammates, and said of it: "What started as an ugly spat turned into a great friendship." Symonds died in a car accident in 2022.
A less politically fraught but more visibly ugly incident followed that April, when Harbhajan, as Mumbai Indians captain, slapped his own countryman S. Sreesanth on the field after an IPL defeat in Mohali. The BCCI suspended him for the rest of the season. He has since called it, repeatedly and without qualification, his biggest regret in the game: "It was my mistake."
After the Turban
Harbhajan retired from all cricket in December 2021, saying plainly that "there comes a time in your life when you must take some tough decisions and move ahead." He moved almost immediately into public life, entering the Rajya Sabha in April 2022 as one of the Aam Aadmi Party's nominees from Punjab. He did not stay; in April 2026 he left AAP for the Bharatiya Janata Party, saying he had gone into politics to promote sport in Punjab and had not been heard: "I don't care about labels," he said of the switch, adding that his commitment "to India and Punjab... does not need validation." Whatever else changes, the Kolkata hat-trick remains the fixed point: a fifty-ball spell, a generation ago, from which the rest of a very long career in public life has never really stopped unspooling.