Narendra Modi took oath as the Prime Minister of the country for the third time. 30 full ministers and 41 state ministers (including five independent incumbents) of the new cabinet have also taken oath. However, some familiar faces were left out of the cabinet this time.
Even before taking oath on Sunday (June 9), Modi invited several NDA MPs to tea at his house at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg that morning. Those left out of the new cabinet were not seen there either. But they got important responsibility in the previous cabinet.
Let’s find out some of the famous names dropped from Modi’s third cabinet…
Smriti Irani
Smriti Irani is considered to be the most talked about among the dropouts. When Modi first formed the government in 2014, popular Hindi serial actress Smriti Irani became a full-fledged politician. Smriti was the Human Resource Development Minister in 2014.
Modi took oath as Prime Minister for the second time in 2019. That year, Smriti stood as a BJP candidate from Amethi and defeated Congress’s Rahul Gandhi by a huge margin. She also served in Modi’s cabinet and was given charge of the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Later, the responsibility of the Ministry of Minority Affairs was given to Smriti.
Smriti once again stood as a BJP candidate from Amethi in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This time it was not Rahul Gandhi but Kishorelal Sharma who fought as a Congress candidate. And that’s what the memory is full of. Kishorelal defeated Smriti by a margin of more than one lakh votes from Amethi. After the defeat in the election, this leader of the BJP also disappeared from the cabinet.
Anurag Tagore
Meanwhile, Anurag Thakur has won five consecutive Lok Sabha elections from Hamirpur constituency in Himachal Pradesh. This time too he defeated the Congress candidate Satpal Rayzada by almost two lakhs. But he was not kept in the cabinet. In the 2019 cabinet, he also held the responsibilities of the Minister of Information and Broadcasting in addition to handling the Sports Ministry. But he was not seen in the cabinet of 2024.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar was sworn in as the Minister of State in 2019. He was responsible for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Water Power. This time he stood from Thiruananthapuram constituency in the Lok Sabha elections. He lost to Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor by 16,000 votes. Rajiv was not seen taking oath in the third Modi cabinet.
RK Singh
RK Singh was sworn in as Minister of State (Independent) in Modi’s second cabinet. The responsibility of the Central Power Ministry was on him. He was not seen in Modi 3.0.
This time RK Singh contested from Ara constituency in Bihar. But he lost to CPI (ML) candidate Sudama Prasad by 60 thousand votes.
Purushottam silver
Purushottam Rupala got the charge of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry in Modi 2.0 i.e. Second Cabinet. But he did not have a place in the third cabinet. However, he defeated Paresh Dhanani of Congress from Rajkot seat in Gujarat by more than 400,000 votes.
Originally Purushottam got involved in controversy by commenting on Kshatriyas during the election campaign. He faced the wrath of the Kshatriyas of North Gujarat and Saurashtra. Later, however, he apologized. It is heard that Modi dropped Purushottam from the third cabinet because of his involvement in the controversy.
Narayan Rane
Narayan Rane contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Ratmgiri-Sindhudurg constituency in Maharashtra. He defeated Shiv Sena’s (UBT) Vinayak Raut by a little over 47,000 votes.
Narayan was in charge of the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Industries in Modi’s second cabinet. But he was not seen in the third cabinet.
This time BJP did not get the majority alone. So Padma Shibir has to depend to a large extent on NDA’s partner parties to form the government. Therefore, everyone is looking at which ministry the partner parties are getting.
According to BJP sources, they can keep ‘important’ ministries like news, home, defence, finance, education and culture in their hands. However, another source says that the coalition partners may make some demands from among the ‘Big Four’ ministries. However, according to BJP sources, several of the other important ministries may be given to alliance partners Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, Nitish Kumar’s JDU, Chirag Paswan’s LJP(R), Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, HD Deve Gowda’s JDS and Jayant Chaudhary’s RLD.
Among the 30 full ministers sworn in as members of Modi’s cabinet on Sunday, 25 are from the BJP. Among them are Rajya Sabha MP S Jaishankar elected from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu’s Nirmala Sitharaman, Himachal Pradesh leader and party All India President JP Nadda. There is Ashwini Vaishnab of Rajasthan, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha, Hardeep Singh Puri of Punjab, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh.
Members of the Lok Sabha include Rajnath Singh from Uttar Pradesh, Amit Shah from Gujarat, Mansukh Mandaviya, CR Patil, Nitin Gadkari from Maharashtra, Piyush Goyal, Sarbananda Sonowal from Assam, Prahlad Joshi from Karnataka, Manoharlal Khattar from Haryana, Dharmendra Pradhan from Odisha, Jewel Orao, Virendra Kumar from Madhya Pradesh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Bhupendra Yadav of Rajasthan, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Giriraj Singh of Bihar, Annapurna Devi of Jharkhand, G Kisan Reddy of Telangana.
The list of five full ministers from allied parties includes Kinjarapu Rammohan Naidu of Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Rajeevranjan (Lallan) Singh of Janata Dal United (JDU), HD Kumaraswamy of Janata Dal Secular (JDS), Chirag Paswan of Lok Janshakti Party Rambilas (LJP), Hindustan Awam Morcha ( Hum) Jitanram Majhi is there.
The six ministers of state from the coalition parties include Shiv Sena’s Prataprao Yadav, Rashtriya Lok Dal’s (RLD’s) Jayant Chaudhary, Republican Party of India’s (RPI-A) Ramdas Athwale, JDU’s Ramnath Tagore, Apna Dal’s (Sonelal) Anupriya Patel and TDP’s Chandrasekhar Pemmasani.
Meanwhile, 35 people have become state ministers from BJP. Among them are West Bengal’s Shantanu Thakur, Sukant Majumdar, Jammu and Kashmir’s Jitendra Singh, Rajasthan’s Arjun Ram Meghwal, Bhagirath Chaudhary, Maharashtra’s Muralidhar Mohal, Uttar Pradesh’s Jitin Prasad, Pankaj Chaudhary, SP Singh Baghel, Kirtivardhan Singh, BL Verma, Kamlesh Paswan, Goa’s Shripad. Naik, Delhi’s Harsh Malhotra, Andhra Pradesh’s Bhupatiraju Srinivas Varma, Chhattisgarh’s Tokhon Shahu, Haryana’s Krishnapal Gujjar.
BJP’s state ministers also include Rao Indrajit Singh, Assam’s Pavitra Margherita, Bihar’s Nityananda Rai, Satish Chandra Dubey, Karnataka’s V Somanna, Karnataka’s V Somanna, Kerala’s Suresh Gopi, Tamil Nadu’s L Murugan, Uttarakhand’s Ajay Tamta, Maharashtra’s Raksha Khase, Telangana’s Bandi Sanjay Kumar, Jharkhand’s Sanjay Kumar. Seth, Durgadas Weeke of Madhya Pradesh and Savitri Thakur, Nimuben Bahmanya of Gujarat. On the other hand, Punjab’s Ravneet Singh Bittu and Kerala’s George Kurien have been inducted into the cabinet despite not being members of either house of parliament.
Source: NDTV and others
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