Ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections, Naveen Jindal, the youngest son of industrialist Om Prakash Jindal, announced his resignation from the Congress party and joined the BJP. Jindal made his official BJP membership at the party’s New Delhi headquarters in the presence of Vinod Tawde, the party’s general secretary. Tawde said that Jindal’s membership would help the government achieve its goal of improving the nation’s wealth and economy.
Personal Life
Jindal was born on March 9, 1970, in Hisar, Haryana. He was the youngest of the four sons of the late Om Prakash Jindal, a politician, philanthropist, and industrialist.
He is a skilled polo player and holds national records in skeet shooting. He participated in the Haryana shooting squad, which took home the gold medal in the civilian division at the 54th National Shooting Championship, held in Gurgaon in May 2011. For turning a faltering steel business into an Asian blue-chip giant, he was named one of Fortune Asia magazine’s 25 Hottest People in Business. Based on a BT-INSEAD-HBR analysis of leading value creators from 1995 to 2011, he was named Business Today’s Best CEO in India. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) of the United States has ranked JSPL as the Second Highest Value Creator globally.
Within three days of taking up the position of president of the Indian Steel Association (ISA), the highest authority for steel manufacturers, Naveen, who is also the chairman of Jindal Steel and Power Limited and the chancellor of OP Jindal Global University, announced his resignation. The ISA’s apex committee, the association’s governing body, overwhelmingly chose Naveen as president. He succeeded Dilip Oommen, the CEO of ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India.
Political Career
In 2004, Naveen Jindal’s political career began with his participation in student demonstrations and his leadership as the University of Texas student union president. Following his post-graduation studies in the United States, Naveen went to India to support his father, OP Jindal, a prominent steel entrepreneur and former Member of Parliament and Minister for Power in the Haryana government, with political problems.
Naveen served as the Congress party’s representative for the Kurukshetra seat in the Lok Sabha for two terms, beginning in 2004 and ending in 2014. Nevertheless, he was not fielded by the Congress for the 2019 general elections after losing to Raj Kumar Saini of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 contest.
Naveen has also been linked to several scandals, including claims that he participated in the Colgate scam in 2012 and that his companies had preferential treatment regarding mining allocations. The former leader of the Congress is also charged in three other cases involving purported anomalies in the distribution of coal blocks. A case under investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) concerns anomalies in Jharkhand’s distribution of the Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is looking into a case involving money laundering related to the distribution of coal blocks. Alleged irregularities in the distribution of the Madhya Pradesh coal block Urtan North are the subject of the third case under investigation by the CBI.
