 "Modi's ministerial expansion on Tuesday")
At least 19 members of Parliament will be sworn in as Union ministers on Tuesday. It will be the second big expansion of the Narendra Modi team after 21 were added to the council in November 2014, including four of Cabinet rank.
Tuesday's expansion will be with an eye on the Assembly polls to five states, particularly the key one of Uttar Pradesh, which are due by February 2017. And, for improving the talent quotient as well achieving targets set out in the government’s Budgets. At a review meeting of the council of ministers last week, the PM had urged his team to complete the targets set out in Union Budgets 2015-16 and 2016-17. It will also seek to improve the representation to tribals, Dalits and OBCs in the council of ministers.
The names of those to be given the oath of office by President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Durbar Hall at 11 am weren’t announced officially, but sources in the party and government shared the probable list (see chart). Many of these 19 met Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Chief Amit Shah on Monday morning.
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Republican Party of India (A) chief Ramdas Athavale met Shah and came out of the meeting to tell journalists he'd be taking the oath on Tuesday. His supporters gathered outside BJP headquarters at 11, Ashoka Road, to raise slogans thanking Modi and Shah. RPI(A) is an ally of the BJP and Athavale, a Dalit and Rajya Sabha member, has some following in his home state. The polls to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) are scheduled for early next year.
If he was happy, other allies were not. In Mumbai, Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray said the BJP leadership had not held any discussion with him on the proposed reshuffle. He said the Sena would not beg for favours and his party hadn't also got its due when the Modi team was constituted after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The BMC polls are likely to cause a strain in the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the state.
Sources claimed the PM laid out the selection framework to handpick doers and performers “who would deliver the on his vision of development and good governance, and further his central priority of gaon (village), garib (poor) and kisan (farmers). Sources claimed it to have been an “exhaustive whetting and selection process to find the best talent” and “people were assessed on the value they would bring in.
Sources also claimed that this “marked a firm departure from the usual routine of frequent changes based on caste, religion and other time serving political considerations” and “is a firm endorsement of the brand of development politics the PM champions. The 19 have been drawn from more than 10 states to represent geographical diversity.
Several of the new ministers are likely to be from UP. On Monday, the Apna Dal's Anupriya Patel merged her party with the BJP. She is a Lok Sabha member from eastern UP’s Mirzapur, a constituency that neighbours Varanasi, that of the PM's. Apna Dal fought the 2014 Lok Sabha as a BJP ally and won two seats, while the BJP bagged 71 of UP’s 80 seats. Patel, who also met Shah, is from the Kurmi community.
The BJP had recently appointed Keshav Prasad Maurya its UP unit chief. Both Patel and Maurya hail from the Other Backward CLasses (OBC) that together comprise 12-13 per cent of UP’s population.
The expansion will also fill the vacancies after Sarbananda Sonowal quit as youth and sports minister to become Assam chief minister, while ministers Raosaheb Danve Patil and Vijay Sampla are now chiefs of the BJP units in Maharashtra and Punjab, respectively. However, Sampla is yet to resign.
There is also a likelihood that some of those above 75 years of age might be given gubernatorial assignments and non-performers dropped. The BJP president is also slated to add to his team.
Currently, the council of ministers, excluding the PM, has 63 members. According to a constitutional bar, the size of the council cannot exceed 15 per cent of the Lok Sabha's strength of 545, that is 82.
