Law Kumar Mishra
Patna, July 7
Second Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from Bihar had been inducted in the Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Ramchandra Prasad Singh, a former personal assistant to the then Railway Minister, Nitish Kumar is now himself a cabinet minister. The second in command in JDU after Nitish Kumar, the-1984-batch IAS officer who had served as principal secretary to Nitish Kumar in Chief Minister Office here, is the lone JDU representative in the Union cabinet. JDU has 16 members in Lok Sabha and BJP 17.
Now, there are only five ministers from the state, three from BJP and one each from LJP and JDU. LJP has five members.
Raj Kumar Singh, a 1975-batch-IAS of Bihar cadre, who was minister of state for energy, was elevated to the Cabinet rank. Singh is BJP MP from Ara, 50 kms from Patna. He had become famous in 1990 when he had arrested the BJP leader L K Advani in Samastipur during the Ram Janambhoomi yatra.
From neighbouring Jharkhand, Ms Annpurna Devi Yadav, Member of Lok Sabha from Koderma, is the second minister from Jharkhand in the Union Cabinet. Arjun Munda is the tribal welfare minister. Annpurna had defeated the former Chief Minister Babulal Marandi in Lok Sabha elections in 2019. Now, Marandi has joined BJP. Annpurna was earlier state president of RJD and had defected to BJP just before the Lok Sabha elections.
Surprise came in the afternoon, when Union Law, Justice and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, MP from Patna Saheb, who had defeated Shatrughan Sinha was dropped. Ravishankar had been active in his constituency, but is understood to have distanced himself from the newly emerged power lobby in state BJP.
Name of the former Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi was in circulation for the last few days as a candidate to be included in the Union Cabinet. He did not receive any invitation till Wednesday evening and stayed indoors in his Rajendra Nagar residence.
Pashupati Kumar Paras, President of a breakaway group of the LJP, was inducted despite reservations of Chirag Paswan, son of LJP founder, who even approached Patna High Court.
From Bihar, in today’s cabinet expansion, two were inducted and one was dropped.
Political observers here claimed the BJP leaders revamped the union cabinet keeping in view the coming assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. While Kurmi and Koeris got fair share, the upper castes, R K Singh and Ashwini Chaubey, representing the two Lok Sabha constituencies close to Uttar Pradesh.
