Jyotiraditya Scindia all set to retain Cabinet berth

Bhopal, June 9: Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was the Union Minister for Civil Aviation and Steel in the previous NDA government, is set to be retained in the Union Cabinet as the NDA council of ministers takes oath under Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday evening, sources said.

Jyotiraditya Scindia's political journey begun after his father and senior Congress leader Madhavrao Scindia died in a plane crash in 2001. He contested the ensuing Lok Sabha bypoll on a Congress ticket from family bastion Guna and won against BJP's Rao Deshraj Singh Yadav by a margin of over 4.5 lakh votes.

He was re-reelected in 2004 from Guna and was inducted into the Union Cabinet in 2007 as the Minister of State for Commerce and Industry in the first tenure of the UPA government led by Manmohan Singh.

A member of the erstwhile royal family of Gwalior, Scindia (53) scored a hat-trick from Guna in 2009. In 2014, he won again from Guna but the UPA lost power to the BJP-led NDA. In fact, Guna and Chhindwara were the only two seats out of the 28 in Madhya Pradesh that the Congress managed to win in 2014.

However, Scindia faced a major setback in 2019 when he lost the Lok Sabha elections against BJP's K.P. Yadav from his family bastion by a margin of 1,25,549 votes. It was a humiliating defeat as it was the first time that any Scindia family member lost from their pocket-borough Guna.

A year earlier in 2018, the Congress led by Kamal Nath, Scindia, and Digvijaya Singh ousted the BJP from power in Madhya Pradesh.

However, the Congress government did not last long as in March 2020, Scindia along with his 22 loyalist MLAs joined the BJP, ending the tenure of the Kamal Nath-led Congress government in Madhya Pradesh, and paving the way for Shivraj Singh Chouhan's return as the CM for a fourth term.

In 2021, the BJP made Scindia a Rajya Sabha MP and handed him the Civil Aviation and Steel portfolios in the second term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also rated among the top performing ministers in PM Modi's Cabinet.

This year, Scindia fought his sixth Lok Sabha elections, but the first on a BJP ticket, and won against Congress' Rao Yadavendra Singh Yadav by a margin of over 5 lakh votes.

Interestingly, Rao Yadavendra Singh Yadav is the son of Rao Deshraj Singh Yadav whom Scindia defeated in 2001 to launch his political career.

Like Scindia, Yadavendra also switched sides from the BJP to the Congress before the Assembly election held in November last year.

A graduate from the Harvard University, Scindia did his MBA from the Stanford University.