PM Narendra Modi's Cabinet: Manohar Parrikar new Defence Minister and Suresh Prabhu gets Railways portfolio

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried out the first expansion of his council of ministers on Sunday inducting former Goa CM Manohar Parrikar and former NDA minister Suresh Prabhu, both known for their administrative acumen, as well as BJP general secretary Jagat Prakash Nadda and former UPA minister Choudhary Birender Singh in the cabinet.

The portfolios for the new ministers were announced late on Sunday night. Parrikar was given the defence portfolio, Prabhu railways, Nadda health ministry and Singh rural development. Jayant Sinha was named the new minister of state in the finance ministry while Olympian Rajyavardhan Rathore was made minister of state for information & broadcasting (I&B). Sadananda Gowda was moved from railways to the law ministry. He takes over from Ravi Shankar Prasad, who retains telecom.

Jaitley was given the additional charge of I&B ministry.

Former Army chief VK Singh was moved from northeast development to statistics and programme implemention.

Almost all the names reported by ET in its edition dated November 7 found a place in the expanded list of ministers.

Apart from the four cabinet ministers, former NDA civil aviation minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy, former NDA junior minister for urban development Bandaru Dattatreya and Noida MP Mahesh Sharma were sworn in as ministers of state with independent charge. In all, 21 ministers were inducted into the council of ministers.

Prabhu, who was a Sena nominee in the Vajpayee government, joined BJP on Sunday and now is a BJP minister in the Modi government.

While Parrikar has flown to Lucknow to file papers to contest Rajya Sabha polls, Prabhu will have to get elected to one of the houses of Parliament within six months.

BJP spokesperson and the party’s Muslim face, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, former Lalu Prasad aide and BJP’s Patliputra MP Ram Kripal Yadav, and the sole Bhumihar representative from Bihar Giriraj Singh, among the 14 ministers of state, sort of balanced the caste, communal and regional equations.

Three out of the four new cabinet ministers are from the Brahmin community. The presence of Fatehpur MP and a Sangh Parivar religious teacher, Sadhvi Niranjan, the only woman, among the 21 inductees as well as that of Singh, the MP from Bihar who had earned notoriety for threatening to pack off opponents of Modi to Pakistan, underscored the fact that the party’s more hardline wing had been represented in the exercise. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were conspicuously absent at the swearing-in, possibly indicating a deepening of political polarization, where most other Opposition parties were not spotted.