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| Three former CMs to be inducted in Cabinet |
| Press Trust of India / New Delhi May 27, 2009, 15:51 IST |
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Former Chief Ministers Vilasrao Deshmukh, Virbhadra Singh and Farooq Abdullah will be inducted into the Union Cabinet tomorrow when the Union Council of Ministers will be expanded to take in 59 more ministers including new entrants Mallikarjun Kharge and M K Alagiri.
Other Cabinet ministers to be sworn in are DMK's Dayanidhi Maran and A Raja, Congress MPs M S Gill, Kumari Selja, Subodh Kant Sahay, G K Vasan, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Kantilal Bhuria (all elevated from the level of Ministers of State) and Congress leader Mukul Wasnik, who was Minister of State in the Narasimha Rao government.
With tomorrow's expansion, the total strength of the Council of Ministers will go upto 79 including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. On Friday, Singh and 19 Cabinet Ministers were sworn in.
Virbhadra Singh, a former Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, has been elected from Mandi while Abdullah from Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir. Deshmukh, a former Maharashtra Chief Minister, is not a member of either House of Parliament.
Ending suspense 11 days after the Lok Sabha results, a PMO press release giving the names of the new ministers said the Prime Minister has recommended to President Pratibha Patil for their inclusion in the ministry.
Those being inducted as Ministers of State with independent charge are Praful Patel (NCP), Prithviraj Chavan, Sriprakash Jaiswal, Salman Khursheed, Dinsha Patel, Jairam Ramesh and Krishna Tirath (all Congress).
Prominent among the new ministers to be sworn in tomorrow are Shashi Tharoor, a former UN diplomat who won from Thiruvananthapuram, Sachin Pilot and Praneet Kaur, wife of former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, and Agatha Sangma, daughter of former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma.
Tomorrow's expansion will also see induction of six Trinamool Congress MPs, four from DMK and one from Muslim League.
Praful Patel retains his status while Chavan, Jaiswal, Dinsha Patel and Ramesh have been promoted to hold Independent charge.
Prominent Ministers of the earlier government who have been dropped include Arjun Singh, H R Bhardwaj, Sis Ram Ola and Saifuddin Soz (all Congress) and T R Baalu (DMK). Ministers of State who did not find a place in the new government are Ashwini Kumar, Rao Inderjit Singh and Santosh Bagrodia (all Congress).
Of the 14 new Cabinet ministers, Kharge, a senior leader from Karnataka, Selja and Wasnik belong to Scheduled Caste while Bhuria belongs to Scheduled Tribe. Krishna Tirath, a Congress member from Delhi who makes her ministerial debut, belongs to Scheduled Caste.
Deshmukh, who belongs to dominant Maratha caste, had to quit as Chief Minister in the aftermath of terror attack in Mumbai in November last year.
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