Media baron and Essel Group chairman Subhash Chandra on Saturday caused an upset when he won Rajya Sabha elections from Haryana as an Independent candidate backed by the BJP. He defeated R.K.
Media baron and Essel Group chairman Subhash Chandra on Saturday caused an upset when he won Rajya Sabha elections from Haryana as an Independent candidate backed by the BJP. He defeated R.K. Anand, who had the backing of the Congress, Indian National Lok Dal and Akali Dal.
Haryana had an interesting Rajya Sabha elections as in order to checkmate the BJP, which was confident of sending Union minister Birender Singh to the Upper House (and who ultimately won comfortably), the Congress had on Friday extended support of its 17 MLAs in the state Assembly to Mr Anand, who also had the backing of INLD’s 19 and Akali Dal’s lone MLA.
A candidate in Haryana needed 31 votes to go to Rajya Sabha. Since Birender Singh’s win was a foregone conclusion, the main contest was between Mr Chandra and Mr Anand. Since Mr Chandra could only fall back on BJP’s 16 surplus votes (which has 47 MLAs in the Assembly), Mr Anand seemed to be having an edge over him in the run-up to the polls. However, after 14 votes were declared invalid, it seemed to have helped Mr Chandra win the polls.
Mr Chandra has been a pioneer in the entertainment industry, launching India’s first satellite television channel Zee TV in 1992 and later the first private news channel Zee News. In 2014 in yet another master stroke, he had started the Zee Zindagi channel, which airs popular Pakistani teleserials that has garnered huge TRPs among the Indian audience across the country.
Born on November 30, 1950 in a Baniya-Marwari family in Haryana’s Hisar, Subhash Chandra is also involved in several philanthropist activities.
From an early age, Mr Chandra displayed his acumen for business. After dropping out from school in his Class 12, he stepped into his family’s rice business. Having to toil hard for his debt-ridden family, Mr Chandra, along with his younger siblings, started trading in rice — basically procuring it locally and selling it to the state-run Food Corporation of India.
From rice, he entered into the vegetable oil business before taking export orders from abroad.
In 1981, a chance visit to a packaging exhibition led him to a new venture and Essel Packaging Limited was born, which later merged into the Swiss group Propack and renamed as Essel Propack.
It was then that amusement parks caught his fancy and he set up a few before entering the media and entertainment space. And from then on, it was history.
