Electoral victories He won for the first time from
Guna constituency at the age of 26. He contested the election on the ticket of
Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the precursor of the present day
Bharatiya Janata Party), which his family had long patronised. When the
Emergency, he fled the country into self-imposed exile in the
United Kingdom. After he returned to
India, he resigned from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. He contested from Guna constituency as an independent candidate and won the seat a second time in spite of the wave in favour of the
Janata Party. In the 1980 election, he switched allegiance to the
Indian National Congress and won from Guna a third time. In 1984, he was nominated as the Congress party's candidate from
Gwalior in a last-minute manoeuvre to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party's
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and won by a massive margin. After that Scindia contested from either Gwalior or Guna and won on each occasion.
Ministerial appointments The 1984 election brought Scindia his first experience as a minister. He made his mark as an excellent administrator during his stint as Railways Minister (22 October 1986 – 1 December 1989) in the
Rajiv Gandhi Ministry. Prime Minister
P. V. Narasimha Rao made him Minister for Civil Aviation. He faced a turbulent period of agitation by the staff of the domestic carrier,
Indian Airlines, and as part of a strategy of disciplining the workforce, he leased a number of aircraft from Russia. Early in 1992 one of these aircraft crashed, though without any loss of life, and Scindia promptly submitted his resignation. Although not known to be too finicky about such notions as ministerial accountability, the prime minister accepted his resignation. Scindia was later reinducted into the Cabinet in 1995 as Minister for Human Resource Development. Scindia is also credited with setting up the
Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (IIITM) at Gwalior as an institution of repute, which got renamed after Atal Bihari Vajpayee as ABV-IIITM.
Opposition years After the defeat of the Indian National Congress in the
1989 Indian general election, Scindia became a prominent member of the opposition. In 1990, after the fall of the
V. P. Singh government, the Congress provided external support to the
Samajwadi Janata Party (Rashtriya) government of
Chandra Shekhar. Scindia was appointed president of the
Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), a post he held until his 3-year term expired in 1993.
Rebellion and return In 1996, he left the Congress party after being accused of bribery by prime minister PV Narasimha Rao. He founded the Madhya Pradesh Vikas Congress (MPVC), and along with
Arjun Singh and other Congress dissidents formed the
United Front government at the Centre. Scindia himself opted to stay out of the cabinet. In 1998, just before the
Lok Sabha elections he merged the MPVC into the Congress party. He won the 1998 Lok Sabha election from Guna. == Death ==