Jyotiraditya Scindia, The Core Chameleon In Madhya Pradesh Politics (Image:Instagram/jyotiradityascindia)
The Indian National Congress (INC) was in huge expectation and merry while they became the single largest political party of Madhya Pradesh in the 2018 state legislative assembly elections. The moment marked a prestigious coming back of the party where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its captain Shivraj Singh Chouhan drafted a strong saffron fortress. It was the first victory of Congress in the state since 2003.
The INC’s veteran leader and former Union Minister Kamal Nath formed the government after several fluctuations in the counting level. INC had 114 seats in their bag while BJP stood just behind with 109. The state has 230 assembly seats in total and needed 116 seats for a majority. INC thus claimed supports of one MLA from Samjawadi Party, two from Bahujan Samajwadi party, and four independent MLAs to form the government.
But the joy remained only one year and three months – the Kamal Nath government lost their majority in the assembly after 12 Congress MLAs resigned along with Jyotiraditya Scindia, the core chameleon of Madhya Pradesh. The 52-year-old incumbent Union Minister of Civil Aviation and Steel, Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia formed the title of major political columns across India in 2020, with his unprecedented jump from Congress to BJP, dismantling the government of the central Indian state. This years election marks a “deliver or you sink” situation for him and his people were accommodated neatly after the deception.
Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia was born on January 1, 1971 in Maharashtra’s Mumbai to Madhavrao Scindia and Madhavi Raje Scindia. Scindia is a grandson of Jiwajirao Scindia, the last Maharaja of the princely state of Gwalior. His father Madhavrao was a politician and a minister in the government of Rajiv Gandhi. His mother, Madhavi Raje (Kiran Rajya Lakshmi Devi), hails from the royal family of Nepal.
He was a contemporary of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi while studying at the Doon School, Dehradun. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Harvard University, USA and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, USA. Besides, Mr Scindia had also worked at the United Nations, and as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.
Jyotiraditya Scindia joined the Congress party in 2002, and contested from the Guna constituency, after it felt vacant due to the death of Scindia”s father, the sitting MP Madhavrao Scindia, in an airplane crash in Uttar Pradesh. He won the election with a, margin of approximately 450,000 votes and re-elected in 2004 also. In 2007, he became the Union Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology. In 2009, he won the third consecutive term and became the Minister of State for Commerce and Industry.
Jyotiraditya Scindia was one among the richest ministers in the UPA government. He was also tasked by the Indian Planning Commission with preventing a repetition of the July 2012 India blackout, the largest power outage in history, which affected over 620 million people (about 9% of the world population). He retained the Guna seat in 2014, but lost to Krishna Pal Singh Yadav in 2019. Mr Scindia was then appointed as General Secretary in-charge for Uttar Pradesh West along with Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
It was on March 10, 2020, he quit the Congress party after disagreements with the INC leadership. The party in-short released a statement as he was expelled because of “anti-party activities”. As other MLA’s who were loyal to him also walked out of the assembly, the government collapsed, and it replaced Kamal Nath with Shivraj Chouhan.
He joined the BJP on the very next day and got elected as the Rajya Sabha MP on June 19, 2020. He was then appointed as the Union Minister of Civil Aviation in the second Narendra Modi ministry. In February 2022, he was appointed Prime Minister”s special envoy to Romania to oversee the evacuation of Indian nationals in Ukraine resulting from the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a part of Operation Ganga, he also oversaw the evacuation efforts of students and Indian professionals through Bucharest and Suceava.
