Biography of Gopal Goyal Kanda, Founder and Chairman, Haryana Lokhit Party

Gopal Kumar Goyal, universally known as Gopal Goyal Kanda, is one of Haryana's most remarkable and widely discussed businessman-politicians, whose extraordinary rags-to-riches journey from a two-room apartment above a shop in Sirsa to the ownership of an airline, real estate empire, hotel chain, and a media company stands as one of the most compelling stories of entrepreneurial ambition and personal reinvention in the contemporary history of the state. Born on 29 December 1965 in Sirsa, Haryana, he built a diversified business empire spanning real estate, aviation, hospitality, education, and media, becoming a significant economic force in both Haryana and the National Capital Region of Delhi before entering politics as an independent candidate and winning the Sirsa constituency of the Haryana Legislative Assembly in 2009. He subsequently founded the Haryana Lokhit Party on 2 May 2014, and after a period of reflection and personal resilience, returned to win the Sirsa constituency again in the 2019 Haryana Assembly Elections, cementing his position as one of the most enduring and talked-about figures in Haryana's political landscape.

His surname Kanda is not his original family name but a title he adopted in tribute to his ancestral and personal connection to the traders and market workers of Sirsa's wholesale vegetable market, where the iron weights used for measuring produce are known as kanda. The name represents a conscious and proud affirmation of his origins in the trading and working communities of Sirsa, a statement of identity that has remained a defining element of his public persona throughout the decades of his rise from market worker and electrician to aviation entrepreneur and elected legislator. He uses the surname Kanda for political and religious purposes, while his official name on business documents remains Gopal Kumar Goyal.

He is married to Saraswati Devi and has three children, a son and two daughters. He is a deeply religious man who has credited his spiritual guide Tara Baba, a local religious leader whose ashram he has supported and developed on an extensive campus in Sirsa, as a central inspiration and source of guidance throughout his extraordinary life journey. His philanthropic activities, which include organising the weddings of impoverished girls, conducting free health camps, distributing free medicines to the needy, and building a school and hospital on the Tara Baba ashram campus, reflect a genuine and sustained commitment to the welfare of the communities from which he rose. 

EARLY LIFE

Gopal Kumar Goyal was born on 29 December 1965 in Sirsa, a city in what was then the state of Punjab and is now the state of Haryana, into a family with roots in the trading communities that had long defined the commercial life of Sirsa's bustling markets. His father, Murli Dhar Kanda, worked as a lawyer, providing the family with a modestly professional household, though their circumstances were far from affluent. The family lived in a two-room apartment above their shop, a living arrangement that was typical of the small trader and professional families of Sirsa in that era, and that gave the young Gopal Goyal his first and most formative lessons in the disciplines of frugality, hard work, and the patient accumulation of resources toward larger ambitions.

His family's ancestral connection to the wholesale vegetable market of Sirsa, where his forebears had worked as traders using the iron weights known as kanda to measure produce, gave him both the surname by which he would later become famous and a deeply personal sense of identification with the working and trading communities of his hometown. The title Kanda, which he adopted as his own, was not merely a nostalgic nod to family history but a deliberate statement of pride in his origins, a refusal to distance himself from the market workers and small traders whose world had shaped his earliest years and whose aspirations he would carry with him throughout his rise. This identification with the common people of Sirsa has been a persistent and genuine dimension of his public persona, expressed through the community welfare activities that have been a consistent thread in his otherwise dramatic and eventful life story.

As a young man, Gopal Goyal Kanda demonstrated from the beginning the entrepreneurial restlessness and the willingness to try and fail across multiple ventures that would eventually lead him to success. He worked as an electrician in a repair shop, repaired radios, ran a music cassette shop, and along with his brother Gobind entered the shoe business, opening first a shoe repair shop and then a shoe store and factory in Sirsa. The shoe business proved difficult and ultimately unsuccessful, and the brothers suffered significant losses. Through all of these early ventures, however, Kanda was building something that proved more durable than any single business: an extraordinarily wide network of relationships with traders, businesspeople, and influential community figures across Sirsa and the surrounding region, relationships built on trust, reliability, and the personal warmth that would remain one of his most recognised qualities throughout his career.

EDUCATION

Gopal Goyal Kanda's formal academic qualifications are not extensively documented in the publicly available record, as is characteristic of self-made entrepreneurs whose path to prominence was built through practical experience, commercial acumen, and relationship-building rather than through formal academic credentials. What is unambiguously clear from his career is that he possesses a formidable practical intelligence, a deep instinctive understanding of markets, relationships, and opportunity, and the personal persuasiveness and strategic awareness that are the essential qualities of a successful entrepreneur and politician in the competitive environment of Haryana's commercial and political life.

His father's profession as a lawyer gave the family an educated household and a degree of exposure to the worlds of law, public affairs, and civic life that went beyond what the family's modest economic circumstances might otherwise have provided. This background, combined with the intensely practical education of working across multiple trades and businesses from a young age, building relationships with traders, businesspeople, and political figures across Sirsa, and eventually navigating the complex world of Gurugram real estate and commercial aviation, gave Kanda a form of business education whose breadth and depth, earned through direct experience and personal resilience, is arguably more relevant to the challenges he has faced and overcome than any formal qualification could have been.

He has consistently attributed his success not to formal education but to the guidance of his spiritual mentor Tara Baba, whose counsel he credits as the decisive inspiration for the pivotal decision in his life: the move to Gurugram in the late 1990s that transformed his fortunes and set him on the path to becoming one of Haryana's most prominent businessmen. This attribution of personal success to spiritual guidance and community values, rather than to formal institutional credentials or family advantage, is consistent with a man whose entire life narrative is defined by the journey from a two-room apartment above a shop to the ownership of an airline, a hotel chain, and a media company.

FAMILY

Gopal Goyal Kanda was born into a family that, while not wealthy, carried the respectable community standing of a professional father and ancestral traders rooted in Sirsa's market life. His father, Murli Dhar Kanda, practised as a lawyer in Sirsa, and the naming of the MDLR Airlines after his father, Murli Dhar, and his son, Lakhpat Ram, expressed in the most public possible way the deep familial devotion that has been a consistent and humanising dimension of Kanda's character throughout his career. His brother Gobind Kanda has been his closest business and political partner, contesting elections three times as a Haryana Lokhit Party candidate for the Rania constituency in 2014 and 2019 and as a BJP nominee in the 2021 Ellenabad by-election, building a parallel public career that reflects the family's shared commitment to Sirsa's political and civic life.

He is married to Saraswati Devi, with whom he has three children: a son, Lakhpat Ram, and two daughters. The family maintains its primary residence in Sirsa, where Kanda has built a palatial home on the outskirts of the city, a property that has been described as fortress-like in scale and ambition and that includes helipads, a reflection of both the extraordinary distance he has travelled from the two-room apartment of his childhood and the personal pride he takes in his hometown, to which he has remained personally and emotionally committed even as his business and political career took him across Haryana and to the National Capital Region. Alongside his family residence, he has developed the campus of Tara Baba Kutiya, the religious estate of his spiritual guide, which includes a temple, a school, a hospital, and extensive community welfare facilities, reflecting the intertwining of personal faith, family values, and community responsibility that characterises his approach to life.

BUSINESS CAREER

Early Ventures: From Electrician to Shoe Business (1980s to 1990s)

Gopal Goyal Kanda's business career began in the most modest possible circumstances. As a young man in Sirsa, he worked as an electrician in a repair shop, repaired radios, and operated a music cassette shop, occupying himself with whatever commercial opportunities the local economy offered while building the relationships and local reputation that would prove essential to every subsequent stage of his career. Together with his brother Gobind, he then entered the shoe business, opening a shoe repair shop that evolved into a shoe store and eventually a shoe manufacturing venture. The shoe business was not ultimately successful, and the brothers absorbed significant losses, but the experience gave Kanda a practical education in the mechanics of retail commerce, supplier relationships, and the management of a small business that proved foundational to his later success in much larger ventures.

Through all of these early commercial activities, the quality that distinguished Kanda from the other small businesspeople of Sirsa was his extraordinary talent for building and sustaining relationships across social boundaries, with fellow traders, with businesspeople of varying scales, with local political figures, and with community leaders. This network of trust and personal connection, built patiently across a decade of commercial effort in Sirsa's markets and business community, proved to be his most durable and valuable asset, and would later give him the social capital, the political relationships, and the community credibility that enabled his entry into real estate, aviation, and politics.

The Gurugram Real Estate Breakthrough (Late 1990s to Mid-2000s)

The transformative turning point in Gopal Goyal Kanda's business career came in the late 1990s, when, acting on the counsel of his spiritual mentor Tara Baba, he made the bold decision to relocate from Sirsa to Gurugram and enter the real estate market. The timing proved extraordinarily fortuitous. Gurugram in the late 1990s and early 2000s was at the very beginning of one of the most spectacular urban and commercial booms in the history of Indian real estate, driven by the rapid expansion of India's information technology and business process outsourcing sectors, the liberalisation of India's economy, and the growing demand for modern office and residential space from multinational corporations establishing their Indian operations in and around the National Capital Region.

Kanda threw himself into the Gurugram real estate market with the same energy and relationship-building instinct that had characterised his earlier commercial ventures, identifying and resolving disputed properties, building connections with the legal, regulatory, and political figures who shaped the Gurugram land market, and accumulating a portfolio of real estate assets and development projects that generated the substantial capital base that would enable his subsequent ventures in aviation and hospitality. His success in real estate in this period was dramatic: within a few years of arriving in Gurugram with limited capital and no established presence in the market, he had become a significant and well-connected figure in Haryana's commercial property sector, with assets spanning both Gurugram and his hometown of Sirsa.

MDLR Airlines: Taking to the Skies (2007 to 2009)

Flush with the success of his real estate ventures, Gopal Goyal Kanda made his most ambitious and most publicly visible business move in March 2007, when his MDLR Group launched MDLR Airlines, a private commercial airline that was named in honour of his father Murli Dhar and his son Lakhpat Ram. MDLR Airlines was a scheduled domestic carrier that represented a significant and genuinely bold entrepreneurial bet on the rapid growth of India's aviation market, which was during this period expanding at extraordinary rates as the liberalisation of Indian civil aviation brought multiple new private carriers into a market that had previously been dominated by state-owned Air India and Indian Airlines.

The airline attracted attention as a new private entrant in a crowded and competitive market, and its launch reflected both Kanda's ambition and his confidence in his ability to build institutions of scale and national significance from a starting point of modest resources and personal determination. MDLR Airlines' operations continued until 2009, when a combination of the global aviation downturn that affected carriers worldwide in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, high fuel costs, and operational challenges led to the suspension of its flights. The airline's brief operational life, while ultimately not commercially successful, represented a genuinely remarkable chapter in Kanda's entrepreneurial story: the son of a small-town lawyer and former market worker who had built an airline named after his father and his son.

Golden Globe Hotels, Media, and Diversified Business Portfolio

Beyond MDLR Airlines, Gopal Goyal Kanda built a diversified business portfolio across multiple sectors during his years of commercial ascendancy in the 2000s and 2010s. He established Golden Globe Hotels Private Limited to develop and operate hotels and commercial malls in Gurugram, entering the hospitality and commercial real estate sectors that were experiencing rapid growth alongside the IT-driven economic expansion of the National Capital Region. He also established a presence in the entertainment sector through an offshore casino operation in Goa, taking advantage of the legal framework that permits such operations in the coastal state. He developed interests in the media sector through Haryana TV, a regional television channel that gave him a communications platform in his home state alongside his political and business activities.

On the Tara Baba Kutiya campus in Sirsa, he invested substantially in building institutional infrastructure that serves both the spiritual and the practical needs of the local community: a school providing education to local children, a hospital providing medical care to the surrounding population, and a temple dedicated to his spiritual guide Tara Baba. These institutional investments on the Tarkeshwar Dham campus reflect a consistent conviction that material success carries with it an obligation to invest in the community from which one has risen, and they have earned him sustained personal goodwill and civic credibility in Sirsa district that has proved as durable as any of his more conventionally commercial achievements.

POLITICAL CAREER

Independent MLA, Sirsa Constituency (2009 to 2014)

Gopal Goyal Kanda entered electoral politics in 2009, contesting the Haryana Legislative Assembly election from the Sirsa constituency as an independent candidate. The decision to enter politics as an independent rather than as a candidate of any established party reflected both the unavailability of a party ticket from the major parties and his confidence in his own standing and relationships within the Sirsa electorate. His instinct proved correct: he won the Sirsa seat convincingly as an independent, demonstrating that his years of community engagement, commercial presence, and relationship-building in the region had created a personal political constituency that transcended party affiliation.

The 2009 Haryana Assembly elections produced a hung assembly in which no single party commanded a majority. The Congress party had won forty seats, six short of the halfway mark required to form a government. Kanda, recognising an opportunity to play a constructive role in the formation of a stable government, extended his support to the Congress and was instrumental in mobilising the support of six independent MLAs whose backing gave the Congress the numbers it needed to form the government under Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. In recognition of his contribution to the government's formation, Kanda was appointed Minister of State for Home, and he also served as Minister of State for Urban Local Bodies and Minister of State for Industries and Commerce, gaining his first experience of executive government and state administration.

Founding the Haryana Lokhit Party (2014)

On 2 May 2014, Gopal Goyal Kanda founded the Haryana Lokhit Party, establishing an independent political platform dedicated to the welfare and interests of the people of Haryana. The name Lokhit, meaning welfare of the people, captures the social commitment that Kanda has consistently emphasised as the animating purpose of his political engagement. He stood as the Haryana Lokhit Party's candidate in the 2014 Haryana Assembly Elections from the Sirsa constituency but was narrowly defeated by the Indian National Lok Dal candidate Makhan Lal Singla, experiencing the setback of electoral defeat with the same resilience that had carried him through the earlier failures of his business career.

The HLP's headquarters were established at the Tara Baba Kutiya campus in Sirsa, reflecting the deep intertwining of Kanda's political, religious, and community identities that has been a consistent feature of his public life. The party received recognition from the Election Commission of India as a state party, giving it formal institutional status in the Haryana political landscape. Kanda's brother Gobind Kanda contested as an HLP candidate in the Rania constituency in 2014 and 2019, extending the party's geographic reach beyond the Sirsa seat and reflecting the family's shared commitment to building an independent political platform rooted in the communities of southern Haryana.

Return to the Assembly: MLA Sirsa 2019 to 2024

Gopal Goyal Kanda's return to the Haryana Legislative Assembly in the 2019 elections was one of the most closely watched and personally significant political comebacks in Haryana's recent political history. Contesting from Sirsa on the Haryana Lokhit Party ticket, he defeated his nearest rival Gokul Setia of the Independent camp by a margin of just 602 votes, a razor-thin victory that reflected the enduring but intensely contested nature of his support base in the constituency. His victory was a statement of personal resilience and of the genuine depth of his long-term relationships with the voters of Sirsa, many of whom had known him as a businessman, a community benefactor, and a local political figure for more than two decades.

The 2019 Haryana elections again produced a hung assembly, with the BJP emerging as the largest party but without a clear majority. Once again, Gopal Goyal Kanda found himself in the kingmaker role, extending support to the BJP-led government of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar and reinforcing his political identity as a figure whose support is a significant factor in the formation of governing coalitions in Haryana. His ability to play this kingmaker role in two successive hung assemblies, in 2009 supporting the Congress and in 2019 supporting the BJP, reflects both the independence of his political positioning and the pragmatic flexibility with which he has always approached the complexities of Haryana's coalition politics.

He served as a member of the Committee on Agriculture in the Haryana Legislative Assembly during his 2019 to 2024 tenure, contributing his perspective as a landowner and community figure in Sirsa district's agricultural heartland to the legislative oversight of Haryana's most economically important sector. He contested the 2024 Haryana Assembly Elections from Sirsa but was defeated by Gokul Setia of the Indian National Congress by a margin of 7,234 votes, with Setia polling 79,020 votes to Kanda's tally.

PHILANTHROPY AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

Gopal Goyal Kanda's philanthropic record in Sirsa district is both extensive and deeply personal, rooted in the conviction that a man who has risen from humble origins carries a particular obligation to give back to the community that shaped him. His most sustained and visible philanthropic commitment is the development and support of the Tara Baba Kutiya campus in Sirsa, also known as Tarkeshwar Dham, a religious and community welfare complex that includes a temple dedicated to his spiritual guide Tara Baba, a school providing education to local children, and a hospital providing medical care to the surrounding population. This campus, built on a sprawling site adjacent to Kanda's own residence on the outskirts of Sirsa town, serves as both a spiritual centre and a community welfare hub.

His other philanthropic activities include the organisation of mass weddings for destitute girls, a form of community service that addresses one of the most practical and pressing welfare needs of low-income families in Haryana, where the costs of wedding ceremonies can represent an overwhelming financial burden. He has also conducted free health camps for the local population and distributed free medicines to those unable to afford them, reflecting a consistent focus on the healthcare needs of the economically vulnerable communities of Sirsa district. These activities, sustained across many years and drawing on his personal resources, have created a body of community goodwill that has consistently translated into political support and have established him as a figure whose relationship with the people of Sirsa district goes well beyond the purely electoral. 

INTERESTING FACTS

• The surname Kanda, by which Gopal Kumar Goyal is universally known, is not his original family name but a title he adopted in tribute to his family's ancestral roots as market traders in Sirsa's wholesale vegetable market, where the iron weights used for measuring produce are called kanda, making his public name a permanent and proud affirmation of his working-class origins.

• MDLR Airlines, the airline he launched in March 2007, was named by combining the initials of his father Murli Dhar and his son Lakhpat Ram, an act of familial devotion that gave his most ambitious business venture the character of a personal tribute to the two generations of his family who bookended his own life and career.

• He credited his spiritual guide Tara Baba with the single most important decision of his business life: the counsel to relocate from Sirsa to Gurugram in the late 1990s, a move that gave him access to one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in India and transformed his fortunes from serial business failure to commercial success.

• He played the decisive kingmaker role in the formation of two successive Haryana governments formed after hung assemblies: in 2009, mobilising six independent MLAs to give the Congress the numbers it needed to govern under Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda; and in 2019, extending support to the BJP's Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, making him arguably the most consequential independent political figure in Haryana's recent political history.

• The Tara Baba Kutiya campus he developed in Sirsa, also known as Tarkeshwar Dham, combines a temple, a school, a hospital, the headquarters of the Haryana Lokhit Party, and Kanda's own palatial residence into a single sprawling complex that serves simultaneously as a religious centre, a community welfare hub, a political base, and a personal home, an integration of spiritual, civic, and political life that is genuinely distinctive in Indian public life.

• He organised mass weddings for impoverished girls across Sirsa district at his own expense, conducted free health camps, and distributed free medicines to those unable to afford them, reflecting the deep and sustained personal commitment to community welfare that has been a consistent thread in his public life alongside and despite the turbulence of his political and legal narrative.

• He attempted to enter Bollywood as a film producer in 2015 with a project reportedly connected to actress Bipasha Basu, reflecting the entrepreneurial restlessness and appetite for new ventures across unexpected domains that has been a defining characteristic of his career from his earliest days as an electrician and shoe shop owner in Sirsa.