Industrialist Naveen Jindal who recently quit the Congress and got the BJP ticket to contest from the Kurukshetra Lok Sabha constituency in the upcoming election reacted to the coal scam charges against him and said he came from a simple family which worked very hard. “My life is like an open book. My father worked hard, and my brothers followed in his footsteps and generated lakhs of employment in factories. We have given taxes to the government in crores and lakhs in the last 20 years. From the land of Haryana, we have contributed a lot to the development of the country. And sometimes some roadblocks come. But truth prevails at the very last. It has been 10 years. Anyone can allege anything but I know people have trust in me and I have trust in the judiciary. And people will know that I have done nothing wrong,” Naveen Jindal said.

Naveen Jindal represented the Kurukshetra constituency as the Congress MP for two terms from 2004 to 2014. In 2014, he lost to BJP’s Raj Kumar Saini and was not fielded by the Congress in 2019.

“I represented Congress Party in Parliament as MP from Kurukshetra for 10 years. I thank the Congress leadership and the then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. Today I am resigning from the primary membership of the Congress Party,” Jindal said announcing his resignation hours before joining the BJP.

As Naveen Jindal resigned, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said this had to happen as Jindal needed a “giant-size washing machine”. “When you need a giant-size washing machine, this had to happen. And after making ZERO contributions to the party in the last ten years, saying I am resigning from it is a big joke,” Jairam Ramesh said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Jindal was being probed in a coal scam case by the CBI and the ED.

Naveen Jindal’s mother, former Haryana minister Savitri Jindal also quit the Congress and joined the BJP. Savitri Jindal was named the richest woman in the country by Forbes India this year.