Prime Minister Narendra Modi will take oath as Prime Minister on Thursday for the second term in office. Most of his ministers from the previous term namely Nitin Gadkari, Rajnath Singh, Nirmala Sitharaman, Piyush Goyal, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Prakash Javadekar, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Kiren Rijiju are likely to make a return into his cabinet.
However, the BJP has also added some new faces in the second term. BJP President Amit Shah reportedly called them on Thursday to inform that they will take oath as ministers in Thursday’s swearing-in ceremony.
Notable among them were Babul Supriyo, who held a junior ministry in the previous government, and Debasree Chaudhuri, another BJP MP from West Bengal. The BJP had made Supriyo a minister in the Modi government in 2014 despite the latter having no previous experience in politics. This, according to many, was to push BJP’s entry into an otherwise Trinamool bastion.
Supriyo’s inclusion paid rich dividends as not only did the saffron party retain his Asansol parliamentary seat in 2019 but also managed to increase its tally to a phenomenal 18.
According to news agency ANI, Chaudhuri said, “Upcoming assembly election will be one-sided because TMC will not exist. Their MLAs & Councillors are joining BJP. TMC will not be able to do anything in next election. BJP will form the govt there. We will finish them in 5-6 months.”
Chaudhuri’s reply is indicative of the BJP’s plan to contest the next 2021 assembly polls with an intention to end Mamata Banerjee’s decade-old rule. The party is buoyed by its phenomenal performance in the just-concluded Lok Sabha polls, when it won 18 out of 42 seats.
This was followed by a host of Trinamool MLAs and municipal councillors joining the BJP, prompting many to conclude that Mamata Banerjee may have lost her invincibile streak in her own citadel. The new BJP under Modi and Shah clearly know how to extract the much-needed electoral advantage out of Mamata Banerjee’s rare fallibility.
Meanwhile, India Today reported that also joining the new Modi’s council of ministers will be motormouth Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Jitendra Singh, Prahlad Joshi, Santosh Gangwar, Rao Indrajit Singh, Mansukh Mandaviya (Rajya Sabha MP), Arjun Meghwal, Parshottam Rupala, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Sadanand Gowda, G Kishen Reddy, Kishan Paal Gujjar, Nityanand Rai and Suresh Angadi.