5 Facts About Maneka Gandhi, BJP Candidate For Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has retained Maneka Gandhi from the Sultanpur Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh. The former Minister of Women and Child Development won the seat in 2019 after she swapped seats with her son Varun Gandhi.

Here are some facts about Maneka Gandhi

1. Maneka Gandhi was born on August 26, 1956, in Delhi, to Amardeep Kaur Anand and Lt Col Tarlochan Singh Anand.  She completed her schooling at Lawrence School, Sanawar, and pursued her higher education at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi. She also studied German at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

2. She first met Sanjay Gandhi, the son of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in 1973. A year later, they got married.

3. In 1980, when Maneka Gandhi was 23 and her son Varun Gandhi was just over three months old, Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash.

4. Maneka Gandhi founded the Rashtriya Sanjay Manch in 1983 with Azamgarh-based politician Akbar Ahmad. She unsuccessfully contested her first Lok Sabha polls as an Independent candidate in 1984 against Rajiv Gandhi from Amethi. In 1988, she joined VP Singh’s Janata Dal Party and became the General Secretary. In 1989, she was elected on a Janata Dal ticket to the Lok Sabha from Pilibhit, a seat she would go on to represent six times.

5. Maneka Gandhi, who served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, formally joined the BJP in 2004. In 2014, after the Narendra Modi-led BJP swept the polls, she was sworn in as a Minister of Women and Child Development. In 2019, she won the Lok Sabha polls from the Sultanpur seat but wasn’t given any ministry. Maneka Gandhi is also an accomplished author, columnist and animal rights activist.