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

“Captain Cool” — this is how his teammates at the Jindal Panther Polo Team describe Naveen Jindal, the 54-year-old flamboyant industrialist who is making a comeback to electoral politics after a hiatus of 10 years.

A two-time Congress MP from Haryana’s Kurukshetra from 2004 to 2014, Naveen sprang a surprise Sunday as he switched to the ruling BJP, which immediately named him its candidate from the constituency in the Lok Sabha elections.

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