The
Journey

Hemant Khandelwal was born on 3 September 1964 in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh. His education took place in Madhya Pradesh, at J.H. Government College in Betul, where he read commerce and then law. He married Ritu Khandelwal in 1990 and built a business with interests in dairy, agriculture and agro products.

Through these decades the family name was already established in Betul politics. His father, Vijay Kumar Khandelwal, became the party's district president in Betul in 1980, later served as treasurer of the state unit, and represented Betul in the Lok Sabha across four consecutive terms. The family's involvement in electoral contests is reported to extend a generation earlier still.

Hemant Khandelwal did not contest an election during this period. His father's death in 2007 changed that.

The by-election necessitated by his father's death was held in 2008. Khandelwal contested it and won, entering the Lok Sabha as the Member of Parliament for Betul. The campaign drew significant support from the state leadership; the then Chief Minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, held a series of public meetings on his behalf.

The term was short by design — a by-election fills only the remainder of a sitting House. It ran until the general election of 2009. What it established was that the seat could be held by the next generation of the family, and that Khandelwal could campaign for it in his own right.

Rather than seeking an immediate return to elected office, Khandelwal moved into organisational work. From 2010 to 2013 he served as the party's district president in Betul — the same post his father had held three decades earlier, in 1980.

District presidency is unglamorous work: mandal and booth committees, membership records, candidate selection at the local level, and the routine coordination that determines whether a party can actually field and support workers on polling day. It is also the position from which Khandelwal's later reputation as an organisation man is usually traced.

In 2013 Khandelwal contested the Betul seat in the Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly and won, defeating the Congress candidate Hemant Waghadare. It was his first full term in an elected House and his first as a state legislator rather than a parliamentarian.

From 2014 he held the state party's treasury alongside his Assembly seat, serving as treasurer of the Madhya Pradesh unit until 2018. Holding a legislative seat and the party's finances at the same time gave him an unusual vantage point — constituency work on one side, the organisation's statewide resourcing on the other.

The 2018 defeat took Khandelwal out of the Assembly but not out of the organisation. This is the period in which his work moved furthest from Betul: assignments in election management and party strategy that took him to Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, and pravasi karyakarta charges — responsibility for workers deployed away from their home units — in 2021 and 2022.

He also continued to work on the party's physical infrastructure in the state, a strand of activity associated with the establishment of district party offices across Madhya Pradesh. By the time the 2023 Assembly election came around, he had spent five years building organisational credit rather than a legislative record.

Khandelwal contested Betul again in the 2023 Assembly election and regained the seat, defeating Nilay Daga — the same opponent who had unseated him five years earlier. He has held the constituency since.

In the general election that followed, he served as convener for election management, a role that placed him at the centre of the state unit's polling-day operation. Within the party he also chairs the Kushabhau Thakre Vichar Nyas, the state unit's think tank, named for one of the organisation's formative figures in Madhya Pradesh.

On 2 July 2025 Hemant Khandelwal was elected State President of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Madhya Pradesh. His was the only nomination filed, and he was declared elected unopposed. He received charge from the outgoing state president, V.D. Sharma, at the party headquarters in Bhopal, at an event attended by the former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the former home minister Narottam Mishra and the state minister Kailash Vijayvargiya.

He was the sitting Member of the Legislative Assembly for Betul at the time of his election and continues to hold that seat. In the months that followed he travelled widely across the state's districts, and the state unit's executive meetings under his presidency have concentrated on booth strengthening, organisational expansion and worker training.