Rajnath Singh gets Home Ministry, Sushma Swaraj is Foreign minister

NEW DELHI: BJP heavyweight Rajnath Singh was today appointed Home Minister and another senior party leader Sushma Swaraj the External Affairs minister in the new government in which Arun Jaitley gets Finance Ministry with additional charge of Defence.

A day after being sworn-in as the head of a 45-member coalition government, new Prime Minister Narendra Modi distributed portfolios to his cabinet colleagues in which Nitin Gadkari becomes the Minister of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways in an experiment combining relating ministries.

Expanding the experiment, Modi also brought back Corporate Affairs to Finance headed by Jaitley.

He has also merged Overseas Affairs Ministry with External Affairs and Urban Development and Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation which has been given to another BJP veteran Venkaiah Naidu.

Significantly, first time MP Jitendra Singh, who was elected on a BJP ticket from Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir, has been made Minister of State in Prime Minister's Office as also of Department of Personnel, which has an administrative control over the CBI.

The Prime Minister will also be the Cabinet Minister of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Department of Atomic Energy Department of Space.

He will also look after "all important policy issues" and all other portfolios not allocated to any Minister, said an official communique of Rashtrapati Bhavan.