Gurugram: Sitting MP and BJP candidate Naveen Jindal won from Kurukshetra by a margin of 29,021 over his nearest rival, Sushil Gupta of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
Jindal and Gupta polled 5,42,175 and 5,13,154 votes, respectively.
Jindal, a two-time MP from Kurukshetra, had won the seat as a Congress candidate in 2004 and 2009. He had quit the Congress to join the BJP on 24 March, and was immediately named as the party’s candidate from Kurukshetra.
Prior to Tuesday’s results, the BJP had never won this constituency before 2014. Since 1977, the seat has been held by Congress on four occasions, by INLD or its previous incarnations on five occasions, and by the Haryana Vikas Party once.
The 54-year-old steel magnate and chairman of Jindal Steel and Power is the son of former Haryana ministers — Savitri Jindal, one of the richest women in the country, and late Om Parkash Jindal, who had set up the Jindal family’s business empire.
Om Parkash also held the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha seat from 1996 to 1998 as a Haryana Vikas Party candidate.
During his campaign, Jindal had promised 2 world-class vocational institutes to train 10,000 boys and girls, and scholarships for poor and deserving girl students, all funded by his foundation.
Gupta is the state president of the AAP in Haryana and a former Rajya Sabha member.
Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini is the outgoing MP from Kurukshetra, who had won this seat in the 2019 elections, defeating Nirmal Singh of the Congress by a margin of over 3.84 lakh votes.
In 2014, Raj Kumar Saini of the BJP had defeated Balbir Singh Saini of the Indian National Lok Dal by a margin of nearly 1.3 lakh votes. Jindal, who was with the Congress at the time, had remained a close third with 2,87,722 votes against the 2,88,376 bagged by the INLD candidate.
(Edited by Tony Rai)