Scindia is the son of politician Madhavrao Scindia, and a grandson of Jiwajirao Scindia, the last ruler of the princely state of Gwalior during the British Raj in India. Jyotiraditya was briefly the titular Crown Prince of Gwalior in 1971, until the privy purses and titles of Indian royals were abolished by the government in 1971.
Scindia in 2008 as Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology
On 30 September 2001, the Guna constituency fell vacant due to the death of Scindia's father, the sitting MP Madhavrao Scindia, in an airplane crash in Uttar Pradesh.[9] On 18 December, he formally joined the INC and pledged to uphold the "secular, liberal and social justice values" of his father.[10]
On 24 February, he won the by-election in Guna, defeating his nearest rival, Desh Raj Singh Yadav of the BJP, by a margin of approximately 450,000 votes.[11] He was re-elected in May 2004,[12] and was introduced to the Union Council of Ministers in 2007 as Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology. He was then re-elected in 2009 for a third consecutive term and became Minister of State for Commerce and Industry.[13]
He was appointed Minister of State for Communication in 2007 later as minister of state independent charge for Power in a cabinet reshuffle which drafted a number of younger politicians into the Indian cabinet, including two other scions of princely families, R. P. N. Singh and Jitendra Singh.[14]
He was among the richest ministers in the UPA government with assets valued at ₹25 crore (US$3.1 million) including investments in Indian and foreign securities worth over ₹16 crore (US$2 million) and jewellery worth over ₹5.7 crore (US$713,831).[15] In 2010, he filed a legal claim to be the sole inheritor of the property belonging to his late father worth ₹20,000 crore (US$3 billion), however this was challenged in court by his aunts.[16][clarification needed]
He was 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).[17][18][19] In May 2013, he claimed that checks and balances had been put in place to prevent any recurrence of grid collapse and that India would have the world's largest integrated grid by January 2014.[20]
Citing disgruntlement with the INC leadership, Scinidia quit the Congress party on 10 March 2020. The Congress party then released a statement claiming that he had been expelled for "anti-party activities." He joined the BJP on 11 March 2020.[23][24] Other MLAs loyal to him also resigned from the INC and their MLA posts. This led to the 2020 Madhya Pradesh political crisis which in turn resulted in the resignation of Kamal Nath as chief minister on 23 March 2020. Nath's replacement, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, was sworn in as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh on 23 March 2020.[25]
In February 2022, he was appointed Prime Minister Modi'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 oversaw the evacuation efforts of students and Indian professionals through Bucharest and Suceava.[28]
^Hartosh Singh Baal (5 November 2012). "The Princelings of India". International Herald Tribune. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022. Retrieved 13 August 2013.
