New Delhi: After a rather placid change of personnel, Prime Minister Narendra Modi played his ace in reallocating the portfolios of his ministers. He played quite a few swift strokes and shunted the high profile Smriti Irani from the Sangh Parivar’s favourite ministry human resource development to textiles and brought in the promoted swayamsewak Prakash Javadekar to this task.
If this is a blow for the aggressive Irani, then there is another gainer Anil Madhav Dave from Madhya Pradesh who comes in place of Javadekar as the minister for environment with independent charge. The RSS link seems to be going strong for Javadekar and Dave. A large number of senior ministers were affected in the process. Union finance minister Arun Jaitley lost the information and broadcasting portfolio to another senior leader M Venkaiah Naidu, who in turn lost the parliamentary affairs job to a third colleague Ananth Kumar who retained his chemicals and fertilisers assignment.
Similarly, another senior minister Sadananda Gowda has been moved out of the law ministry and handed over the statistics portfolio. The gainer being the telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. A senior lawyer, the law portfolio is an additional assignment for him. Two ministers- Birendra Singh rural development and Narendra Singh Tomar steel and mines have swapped their jobs, but in the process the mines portfolio has gone to Piyush Goyal. He has now all the four ministries-coal, energy, renewable energy and mines. This possibly compensates for the missed elevation to cabinet status.
From Maharashtra, two new ministers of state Subhash Bhamre and Ramdas Athavale have been allocated defence and social justice respectively. In a rather surprising move, minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha who was doing a rather good job, has been moved to civil aviation. Almost mid-way through his five year term, Modi seem to have shed his initial fascination for the sloganminimum government, maximum governance. Recognising the caste, social and regional realities of the political landscape, he has inducted 19 junior ministers to enlarge his team of ministers to 78.
The number 78 has come through successive expansions, as two years ago, when he began his stint in office he had a lean team of just 45 ministers.
