Varun Gandhi - Career

Career

The nature of his profession and ideological affiliations, coupled with the inexperience of his age, have invited criticisms about him and his ways. In an interview to Stephen Sackur in BBC's HARDtalk in October 2005, Gandhi answered questions about the reasons behind his political affiliation and defended his father as someone who had helped revive the industrialisation of India by starting Maruti Udyog and whose strategy helped the Congress party's comeback after the first ever non-Congress Janata Dal government following an electoral routing for the Indira Gandhi-government after Emergency, among many other things.

In the 2009 general election, the BJP decided to field Varun Gandhi as its candidate from the Pilibhit constituency instead of his mother Menaka Gandhi. He won the seat by receiving 419,539 votes and defeated his nearest contending candidate, V.M. Singh, by a margin of 281,501 votes. The victory was the strongest of any of the four Gandhi family candidates in the election: his mother Maneka Gandhi, aunt Sonia Gandhi and first cousin Rahul Gandhi. The security deposits of all other candidates, including those of V.M. Singh of the Indian National Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party candidate Ganga Charan Rajput were forfeited. During election campaign, a controversial speech by him resulted in his judicial custody prior to the election. On 6 March 2011 he got married to Yamini Rai Choudhuri at Varanasi.