Naveen Jindal’s second coming: Polo player to pet lover, steel tycoon rides on BJP to reclaim poll fray | Political Pulse News

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

Naveen had first hit the headlines in 1992. A freshly minted management graduate from University of Texas where he won the student leader of year award, Naveen had then raised objection when the local deputy commissioner asked him to remove the tricolour flying atop his factory at Raigarh in Chhattisgarh.

He went 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 also 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 then Lok Sabha elections from the Kurukshetra seat. But 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.

Subsequently, Naveen enjoyed a smooth run with then Congress CM Bhupendra Singh Hooda and his son and fellow parliamentarian Deepender Singh Hooda. Locals remember Naveen and Deepender fighting a friendly boxing match in crisp white kurta pyjama to promote the sport in Haryana.

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 block allocation scam cases during the Congress-led UPA rule in 2014, was brought down by the strident BJP campaign, with the BJP candidate defeating him by a huge margin in the 2014 polls. The Congress did not give him ticket in the 2019 elections.

However, their political setbacks did not affect the family’s fortunes. In 2023, India’s wealthiest woman Savitri witnessed an unparalleled surge in her wealth as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In 2009, Naveen founded the O P Jindal global university at Sonepat in memory of his father. As an acknowledgment of his donations, his alma mater University of Texas renamed its School of Management Naveen Jindal School of Management in 2011.

When not presiding over the affairs of his steel and power companies and the varsity, Naveen enjoys captaining his polo team Jindal Panther. Last year, he steered his team, which includes Arjuna awardee Simran Shergill, to victory at the Indian Masters Polo Championship, “Polo is not a sports, it’s a way of life, it teaches you discipline and team work,” is his standard line for anyone he thinks would be remotely interested in the game. He is also known to be a pet lover, thanks to his 13-year-old dog Chester that he calls his “best friend”. His steel mills routinely celebrate “Pawsome Days”.

A champion skeet shooter in his younger days, Naveen holds a national record in shooting. He also sponsors budding shooters. In 2022, his protege Mairaj Ahmad Khan won a gold at the International Shooting Sports Federation World Cup held in South Korea.

Naveen also has ties with Punjab through his wife Shallu, an accomplished Kuchipudi dancer, who belongs to the Oswal family of Ludhiana. The couple has a son and a daughter.

As Naveen gears up to fight the upcoming polls on the ticket of the BJP, which had been most vocal in raking up corruption charges against him, it is to be seen what will happen to the “Coalgate” cases pending against him.