37 Ministers from outgoing Govt dropped
* Cabinet to hold first meeting today evening
NEW DELHI, June 9: Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister at the Rashtrapati Bhavan here on Sunday, becoming only the second PM after Jawaharlal Nehru to secure a third consecutive term.
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Along with Modi, who took oath in the name of God, senior BJP leaders Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, Nirmala Sitharaman and S Jaishankar were sworn in as Cabinet Ministers, indicating the Prime Minister’s emphasis on continuity and experience as they also held senior positions in his second term.
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Party president J P Nadda returned to the Cabinet after five years, while former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and ex-Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar were the fresh faces in the Modi Cabinet.
BJP leaders Piyush Goyal, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Dharmendra Pradhan and Bhupender Yadav, who were earlier in the Rajya Sabha but have now been elected to the Lok Sabha, were among those retained as Ministers.
Former Assam CM Sarbananda Sonowal, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Virendra Kumar, Pralhad Joshi, Giriraj Singh and Jual Oram, all from BJP, were among those sworn in as Ministers.
President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office to them.
Modi, 73, first became Prime Minister in 2014 and then returned to office in 2019. He was re-elected to Lok Sabha from Varanasi.
Among the allies of the BJP, which did not get a majority on its own this time, JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy, HAM (Secular) chief Jitan Ram Manjhi, JD(U) leader Lalan Singh and TDP’s K Ram Mohan Naidu also took the oath of office as Ministers.
Congress president and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge was present, even as several opposition leaders skipped the ceremony.
Those present on the occasion included Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar, Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud, TDP president Chandrababu Naidu and JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar.
Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan and Rajinikanth, and industrialists Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani were among those who attended the swearing-in ceremony.
Modi’s third term, which always appeared inevitable, did not come with the massive mandate he and his party had been claiming, as the Congress and its allies in the INDIA bloc fought a doughty rearguard battle to shock the BJP in its strongholds such as Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Top leaders from India’s neighbourhood and the Indian Ocean region — Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu, Bangladesh Premier Sheikh Hasina, Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, Bhutanese PM Tshering Tobgay and Vice-President of Seychelles Ahmed Afif — were special guests at the function.
In addition to political leaders and eminent persons from different walks of life, members from the transgender community as well as sanitation workers and labourers, who were involved in the construction of the new parliament building, also attended the swearing-in ceremony of Modi and the new council of Ministers.
Nearly 9,000 people were estimated to be present at the forecourts of the Rashtrapati Bhavan for the grand event.
Modi chose a white kurta and churidar with a blue chequered jacket as he took oath for the consecutive third time on Sunday.
Modi paired his dress with black shoes for the swearing-in ceremony at the forecourts of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
When he took oath as the Prime Minister for the first time in 2014, Modi had worn a cream linen kurta-pyjama with a beige golden jacket. For his 2019 swearing-in ceremony, the Prime Minister had chosen a similar dress paired with a beige jacket.
Kurtas and bandhgala jackets are Modi’s popular choice on important occasions. He is also known for sporting flamboyant and colourful turbans during Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations.
Modi chose a multi-coloured “bandhani” print safa for his Republic Day look in January this year.
Meanwhile, the first meeting of the third Narendra Modi Cabinet is likely to be held on Monday evening at the Prime Minister’s Lok Kalyan Marg residence, the sources said.
The newly inducted Ministers would meet at Modi’s residence at 5 pm.
BJP president J P Nadda also hosted a dinner for those inducted in the new Modi Government’s Council of Ministers, the sources said.
Meanwhile, as many as 37 Ministers have been dropped from the Government in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third term and these include seven with cabinet rank — prominent among them being Smriti Irani, Anurag Thakur and Narayan Rane.
Parshottam Rupala, Arjun Munda, RK Singh and Mahendra Natha Pandey, also held cabinet positions in the second Modi government but were not retained in the Council of Ministers that took oath on Sunday
While all three Ministers with Independent Charge have been retained, out of 42 Ministers of State, 30 have been dropped.
Those who have not been repeated include VK Singh, Faggansingh Kulaste, Ashwini Choubey, Danve Raosaheb Dadarao, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sanjeev Balyan, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Subhas Sarkar, Nisith Pramanik, Rajkumar Ranjan Singh and Pratima Bhoumik.
Meenakshi Lekhi, Munjapara Mahendrabhai, Ajay Kumar Mishra, Kailash Choudhary, Kapil Moreshwar Patil, Bharati Pravin Pawar, Kaushal Kishore, Bhagwanth Khubha and V. Muraleedharan have also not been retained.
Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma, John Barla, Bishweswar Tudu, Bhagwat Kishanrao Karad, Devusinh Chauhan, Ajay Bhatt, A. Narayanaswamy, Som Parkash, Rameswar Teli and Darshana Vikram Jardosh have also not made it to the new Council of Ministers.
Eighteen of the dropped ministers had lost the elections. L Murugan is the only Minister of State from the previous government who lost the election but has been retained. He is already a member of the Rajya Sabha.
Smriti Irani, a Cabinet Minister in both terms of the Modi Government, lost the election from Amethi to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s aide Kishori Lal Sharma by a margin of over 1.69 lakh votes.
Irani was HRD Minister and Textile Minister in the first term while she held Women and Child Development and Minority Affairs portfolios in Modi 2.0.
Parshottam Rupala was the Minister of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying in the previous government.
Rupala, who found himself in the eye of a storm kicked off by his allegedly derogatory remarks about the Kshatriya community ahead of elections, eventually emerged unscathed as he won Gujarat’s Rajkot Lok Sabha seat with a record margin of around five lakh votes.
His deputy in the Fisheries Ministry, Sanjeev Kumar Balyan has also been dropped.
Balyan, a two-time MP from Muzaffarnagar, lost the seat by over 24,000 votes this time.
Anurag Thakur, who won for the fifth consecutive time from the Hamirpur Lok Sabha constituency, held the dual charge of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, in Modi 2.0.
Mahendra Nath Pandey, Minister of Heavy Industries, was seeking a hat-trick from Chandauli but lost to Samajwadi Party’s Birendra Singh.
Raj Kumar Singh, earlier the Union minister for power and renewable energy, lost the seat in Bihar’s Arrah to CPI(ML)-Liberation’s Sudama Prasad by 59,808 votes.
Narayan Rane, who was the MSME Minister, wrested Ratnagiri- Sindhudurg Lok Sabha constituency from the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena in a prestige battle.
This is the first time the BJP has won a Parliamentary seat in the coastal Konkan region, a traditional stronghold of the Shiv Sena (Undivided).
Former Maharashtra CM Rane joined the BJP in 2019 and was nominated to Rajya Sabha. This was his debut Lok Sabha election.
Rajeev Chandrashekhar, who was the Minister of State for Skill Development, Electronics and IT and Jalshakti, lost the election from Thiruvananthapuram to sitting Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.
“Today curtains down on my 18-year stint of public service of which 3 years I had the privilege to serve with PM @narendramodi ji’s TeamModi2.0. I certainly didn’t intend to end my 18 years of public service as a candidate who lost an election but that’s how its turned out.
“My deepest thanks to all those I met, all those who supported me – and in particular all those karyakartas and leaders who so inspired and energized me. Thanks also to my colleagues in govt over last 3 years,” Chandrashekhar wrote on X.
Former Union Minister of State for sport and youth affairs Nisith Pramanik lost the Cooch Behar seat in West Bengal to TMC’s Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia by 39,250 votes.
Subhas Sarkar, who was MoS Education in the Modi 2.0 government, lost the Bankura seat to Trinamool Congress’s Arup Chakraborty by 32,778 votes.
Modi scripted history on Sunday as he took the oath of office for a third straight term, becoming the first non-Congress leader and second after Jawaharlal Nehru to achieve the feat that few thought possible for a BJP leader until he shook up national politics in 2014.
Despite the challenges thrown by the polls, Modi, 73, remains the fulcrum around which Indian politics is bound to revolve in the coming years, while he himself will have to negotiate the sharp bends and blind turns of coalition politics for the first time since he entered the electoral politics as Gujarat chief minister in 2001.
Since leading the BJP for the first time in the Gujarat assembly polls in 2002, held in the shadow of the riots in the state following the Godhra train burning incident, Modi has never looked back, remaking the substance and sentiments of politics like few before him.
While his detractors had written him off politically in 2002, he has gone from strength to strength, becoming a winning mix of Hindutva and development for his party.
He has been since leading his party to victory and power in 2002, 2007 and 2012 in Gujarat, and then in 2014 and 2019 at the Centre. It is though different this time as the BJP has lost majority on its own.
The Prime Minister is facing the strongest opposition since he first took office in 2014. Critics have also questioned his ability to set the political agenda on his terms after the opposition dented the BJP in several states, not the least in the saffron citadel of Uttar Pradesh where the SP-Congress alliance trumped the BJP-led combine.
Having seen the vagaries of politics during over a decade and a half of tenure in the BJP’s organisation, Modi has presented a picture of unflappable confidence in analysing the results, making no allowances for the opposition’s surprise successes in parts of the country.
That the BJP has scored an almost clean sweep of Lok Sabha polls in Odisha and won a majority in its assembly for the first time besides doubling its tally of MPs in Telangana and opening its account for the first time in Kerala, underscores the durability and wide resonance of his appeal, BJP leaders have pointed out.
As Modi takes guard for a third term with trusted and seasoned hands around him, the BJP is hopeful that he will prove his detractors wrong and continue to fuel the party’s expansion horizontally and vertically with his inventive policies in Government and new set of ideas in politics with the core of Hindutva, development and welfarism remaining intact.
He will soon be tested in another set of elections, this time in assembly polls in Haryana and Maharashtra, the two states where the BJP has suffered setbacks and contests are due around October. (PTI)
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