Madhya Pradesh cabinet expansion today; focus on new faces, Jyotiraditya Scindia's men

NEW DELHI: Three months after taking oath as Madhya Pradesh chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan has got the green signal to expand his cabinet for the second time, with BJP general secretary in charge of MP Vinay Sahashrabuddhe reaching Bhopal on Wednesday with the list of names finalised by the central BJP leadership. The names will be announced on Thursday morning after discussion with party leaders.

While Chouhan had put forward a list of senior state leaders who have been former ministers, party sources said the central leadership was not ready to accept all the names suggested by Chouhan. The central leadership wanted some new faces in the list keeping an eye on the upcoming assembly elections. On April 21, five ministers were inducted into the government.

A number of meetings took place at Bhopal and Delhi to finalise the list of ministers. CM Chouhan himself stayed in Delhi for two days to convince the party leaders about some of the former ministers to be inducted in the new cabinet.

Sources told ET that Rajya Sabha MP Jyotiraditya Scindia wanted a cabinet berth for 10 more leaders from his camp and he didn’t budge on the earlier promise made to him by the party. In the first expansion, two of his loyalists –– Tulsi Silawat and Govind Rajput –– had become ministers.

Apart from that, there are four former Congress MLAs, Bisahulal Sahu, Endal Singh Kasana, Hardeep Dang and Ranveer Jatav, who had joined the party with a promise to be made ministers. Similar is the case with BSP MLA Sanjeev Kushwaha and independent MLA Pradeep Jaiswal. This leaves the BJP with 12-13 vacancies for BJP leaders.

While Shivraj was in Delhi, the party leadership called the state’s home and health minister Narottam Mishra to Delhi to discuss the cabinet expansion. There are reports that Mishra wanted to become the deputy CM as he was the mastermind behind upstaging the Congress government. The party thinks this would give Scindia also a chance to demand a deputy CM’s post and no decision on this has been taken.

From Shivraj Chouhan’s list, Gopal Bhargav and Bhupendra Singh have made it to the final list while there is suspense over few like Vishwas Sarang, Sanjay Pathak and others, as per sources.