Gujarat’s clout: Falls in number, rises in heft

GANDHINAGAR: Although the number of MPs from

Gujarat

in the Narendra Modi cabinet 2.0 has gone down, the entry of political heavyweight Amit Shah has increased the heft of Gujarat in the new government considerably. Both PM Modi and Amit Shah, the de facto number 2 in the NDA government, are from Gujarat.


Besides Amit Shah, who took the oath as cabinet minister at a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhawan on Thursday evening, the two other ministers from Gujarat, sworn in at MoS rank, were are Parshottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandaviya.

In the last Modi ministry, there were two cabinet-rank ministers from the Gujarat in Arun Jaitley (he moved to another state in the 2017 Rajya Sabha election) and Smriti Irani. In addition, there were four MoS-rank ministers — Mansukh Mandaviya, Parshottam Rupala, Haribhai Chaudhary and Jaswant Bhabhor — representing three of the four geographic regions of the state.

In these elections, Smriti Irani contested and won the Amethi Lok Sabha seat, defeating Congress president Rahul Gandhi. She thus ceases to be an MP from Gujarat.

Against two cabinet rank ministers in the earlier Modi ministry, Amit Shah will be the only cabinet-rank minister from Gujarat. Till Thursday morning, it was expected that the PM would try to strike a regional and caste balance while naming ministers from Gujarat. It now seems that performance was the only criterion for choosing his team.