BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar was among the party leaders inducted into the Modi government on Wednesday. He is a national spokesperson for the party and represents Karnataka. He is likely to be given a Minister of State portfolio.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, along with others included in the Cabinet, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. He was the BJP co-incharge of Puducherry and the recent victory of the NDA in the Union Territory helped his cause for a place in the government. He was earlier the NDA Vice Chairman in Kerala.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar has been in public life ever since his nomination to the Upper House apart from his long career as an entrepreneur. He was an independent member of the Rajya Sabha from 2006 to 2018 before he was inducted into the BJP. He got the support of the BJP and JD(S) in both 2006 and 2012 when he became an independent member. In 2018, he resigned from his position at ARG Outlier Asianet News Private Limited, which owned the news television channel Republic TV.
Rajeev was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat to a military family and studied in various schools in the country when he was growing up. He studied engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology in Manipal, Karnataka and the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago along with the Advanced Management Program from Harvard University before returning to India and founding BPL Mobile in 1994. Chandrasekhar founded Jupiter Capital in 2005 and is on the board of directors of the company. It has many subsidiaries including media companies like Suvarna News and Asianet. He is also founder trustee of the Namma Bengaluru Foundation, which advocates for issues in Bengaluru.
He was inducted into the cabinet alongside Udupi-Chikkamagaluru MP Shobha Karandlaje and Chitradurga MP Narayanaswamy from Karnataka.