 "Jyotiraditya Scindia")
Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia is again in the electoral fray from Madhya Pradesh’s Guna, a parliamentary constituency he has won on four occasions as a Congress candidate, including on his electoral debut in a bypoll in 2002, after his father Madhavrao Scindia, the incumbent Lok Sabha member of Parliament (MP) from the seat, had passed away.
He won the seat in 2004, 2009 and 2014. In 2019, in a setback rivaling that of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s loss from Amethi, Jyotiraditya lost to his former aide Krishna Pal Yadav of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by a sizeable margin of over 125,000 votes from Guna. In 2020, Jyotiraditya defected to the BJP. He has been the party's Rajya Sabha member, and was inducted into the Union Cabinet and given the Civil Aviation portfolio. For the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP dropped Yadav to field Jyotiraditya from the seat.
For the 2024 polls, Jyotiraditya faces Congress' Rao Yadavendra Singh Yadav, son of the former BJP legislator Deshraj Singh Yadav. As a BJP candidate, Deshraj contested against Madhavrao from Guna in 1999. Yadavendra joined the Congress from the BJP before the 2023 Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh. He lost to the BJP candidate from the Mungaoli seat.
Guna, along with the Gwalior parliamentary constituency, is closely linked with Jyotiraditya. His grandmother Vijayaraje Scindia was elected from Guna to the Lok Sabha on several occasions as a Congress, a Swatantra Party and a BJP candidate from 1957 to 1998. Madhavrao was elected three times from Guna. First as a candidate of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP, in 1971, then as an Independent in 1977, and as a Congress candidate in 1980. In 1984, at the insistence of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, Madhavrao contested from the Gwalior seat, defeating BJP's veteran leader and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He represented Gwalior in the subsequent elections, returning to become an MP from Guna in 1999. Guna will go to the polls on May 7.
