In the fray against her this time as a SAD candidate is her former aide Deepinder Singh Dhillon, who turned rebel ahead of the 2012 Assembly polls after being denied a Congress ticket from the Dera Bassi seat.
In the past three Lok Sabha elections, Preneet, the Union minister of state for external affairs, has trounced three SAD stalwarts from here -- Kanwaljit Singh, Prem Singh Chandumajra and Surjit Singh Rakhra.
The 69-year-old Kaur, wife of Patiala royal Amarinder Singh, is striving to defend her family's bastion here even as her husband focuses on winning the Amritsar seat on a Congress ticket against BJP's Arun Jaitley.
For his part, 53-year-old Dhillon can count on his strong support base in the Dera Bassi and Rajpura areas as he looks to inflict an electoral defeat on his former mentor.
Dhillon is seen as being a candidate who can make the going difficult for Preneet given that he knows the 'ins and outs' of the Congress party in Punjab and could manage to bring in more Congress members into the SAD fold. Besides, he has strong backing of state revenue minister Bikram Singh Majithia, who brought him into SAD.