Gurugram: India’s richest woman, former Haryana minister Savitri Jindal, had won the Hisar assembly seat, according to the Election Commission data as of 2:20pm, defeating her nearest rival Ram Niwas Rara of the Congress by over 18,000 votes.
Jindal secured 49,231 votes, while Rara and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)‘s Kamal Gupta trailed behind with 30,290 and 17,385 votes, respectively.
Jindal, the mother of industrialist Naveen Jindal—the BJP MP from Kurukshetra in Haryana—is contesting as an Independent from Hisar. She previously represented this constituency for two terms, from 2005 to 2009 and from 2009 to 2014, and it is the seat from which her late husband, O.P. Jindal, was elected on three occasions.
She is the chairperson of the OP Jindal Group, a major steel and power conglomerate founded by her late husband.
Following her husband’s death in 2005 in a chopper crash, Jindal took over his business. She continued to expand its influence in the industrial sector. She was twice elected to the Haryana Vidhan Sabha from her husband’s former seat, once in 2005 and then in 2009, on a Congress ticket.
However, she lost this seat in 2014 and didn’t contest in 2019.
This time, she received support from Zee TV founder Subhash Chandra, who was once involved in a long legal battle with her son Naveen, after the latter lodged a complaint of coercion and corruption against two editors of the Hindi language entertainment channel.
Jindal has previously held several key portfolios in the Haryana government, including as minister of state for revenue and disaster management, consolidation, rehabilitation and housing under the then chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, and as minister of state for urban local bodies and housing.
She is also known for her philanthropic work, which supports education, healthcare and rural development initiatives. She has consistently appeared on lists of the world’s wealthiest women thanks to her family’s vast industrial empire.
Jindal’s rival, Kamal Gupta of the BJP, was Haryana’s health minister in the Nayab Singh Saini government. A doctor by profession, Gupta won Hisar seat in 2014 and 2019. Besides Gupta, Ram Niwas Rara of the Congress is also in the fray.
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