Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia was inducted into the Union Cabinet on Wednesday. He is a Member of Parliament in the upper house of parliament representing the State of Madhya Pradesh. He was a former member of the Lok Sabha, representing the Guna constituency in Madhya Pradesh until his defeat in the 2019 general election. Scindia is a former member of the Indian National Congress (INC) and is presently a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Born on 1 January 1971, he belongs to the House of Scindia that once ruled in Gwalior. Scindia has received his primary education at Campion School, Mumbai, and then at The Doon School, Dehradun. Scindia was admitted to St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi but he later transferred to Harvard College where he graduated with a BA degree in Economics in 1993. In 2001, he received a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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His political career began when on 30 September 2001, the Guna constituency fell vacant due to the death of Scindia’s father, sitting MP Madhavrao Scindia, in an airplane crash in Uttar Pradesh.

On 18 December, he formally joined the INC & pledged to uphold the “secular, liberal and social justice values”. He has since then served as minister of state in various capacities.

Scindia’s loyalty moved to his arch-rival Bharatiya Janata Party after differences with the grand old party in 2020. On 19 June 2020, he was elected a BJP Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh.

Earlier this year, Rahul Gandhi had reportedly told his party’s youth wing leaders that had Scindia remained in the Congress he would have certainly become the chief minister but he was now a “backbencher” in the BJP, and that he “chose a different path” by joining the BJP, where he can never be the chief minister.

Scindi, in a sharp response to Gandhi’s remark, said, “It would have been a different situation had Rahul Gandhi been concerned the same way as he is now, when I was in the Congress.”