Kissan anger in Haryana: will Naveen Jindal deliver for BJP sans MSP 'guarantee'?

Naveen Jindal, the politician-industrialist, who is one of the richest men in India was seen loading bags full of wheat into a truck in the Radaur grain market of Yamunanagar district. This video came two days before the Lok Sabha elections began.

It appears that the industrialist was trying to connect with the farmers as he is making a comeback to politics after a hiatus of 10 years.

Jindal, a two-time Congress MP from Haryana’s Kurukshetra from 2004 to 2014, sprang a surprise when he switched to the ruling BJP, which immediately named him its candidate for the constituency in the Lok Sabha elections.

The chairman of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL), Naveen is the youngest of four sons of the late O.P. Jindal, who rose from farming in Hisar to found one of the largest steel industries in the country.

Naveen first hit the headlines in 1992 when, as a new management graduate from the University of Texas, objected when the local deputy commissioner asked him to remove the tricolour flying atop his factory at Raigarh in Chhattisgarh.

Jindal took the matter to the high court, seeking a change in the flag code to enable every Indian citizen to fly the tricolour on all days of the year. Finally, in 2004, the Supreme Court gave its judgment in his favour, ruling that flying the national flag was a symbol of freedom of expression.

The Jindal family had been aligned with the Congress party since patriarch O.P. Jindal’s electoral debut on the party ticket in the 1991 Assembly polls. Both O.P. and, after his death, his wife Savitri served as ministers in different Congress governments in the state. However, O.P.’s differences with the then Chief Minister Bhajan Lal in 1996 led to his shift to ex-CM Bansi Lal’s Haryana Vikas Party, on whose ticket he successfully contested the Lok Sabha elections from the Kurukshetra seat.

He returned to the grand old party in 2000 and decided to usher Naveen into politics from Kurukshetra in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, choosing to contest himself in the Assembly elections from Hisar. A year later, he died in a helicopter crash at Saharanpur along with Bansi Lal’s son Surendra Singh.

The Jindal family’s winning streak in politics ended in 2014 when both Naveen, from Kurukshetra, and his mother Savitri, who contested from her husband’s Hisar Assembly seat, lost the polls.

Ironically, Naveen, who was booked by the CBI and the ED in the alleged coal scam cases during the Congress-led UPA rule in 2014, was brought down by the BJP campaign, with the BJP candidate defeating him by a huge margin in the 2014 polls. The Congress did not give him a ticket in the 2019 elections.

As Naveen is contesting the polls on a BJP ticket, it remains to be seen what will happen to the coal scam cases pending against him.

As Naveen Jindal resigned in March this year, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh commented, "When you need a giant-size washing machine, this had to happen. And after making ZERO contributions to the party in the last ten years, saying I am resigning from it is a big joke," in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Also watch: Naveen Jindal, wife declare assets worth nearly Rs 1,000 crore