Haryana chief minister Nayab Singh Saini extended his cabinet Tuesday and appointed eight ministers, seven of whom are first time ministers. Governor Bandaru Dattatreya administered the oath of office to these ministers at Raj Bhavan.
Kamal Gupta, the MLA from Hisar and a former minister in the previous Manohar Lal Khattar government, is the only one to be re-appointed as a Cabinet minister. All the seven first-time ministers took oath as ministers of state with independent charge. With this expansion, the council of ministers now consists of 14 members, including the chief minister.
Earlier, CM Saini took oath along side five other ministers on March 12. Senior BJP leader and former Home Minister Anil Vij has been excluded from the cabinet as of now. Vij even visited the assembly and spoke to reporters later, claiming he had urged the Assembly Speaker to make him “a member of the Vidhan Sabha committees”.
The seven Ministers of State are Seema Trikha (Badkhal MLA), Mahipal Dhanda (Panipat Rural), Aseem Goel (Ambala City), Abhey Singh Yadav (Nangal Chaudhary), Subhash Sudha (Thanesar), Bishamber Singh Balmiki (Bawani Khera), and Sanjay Singh (Sohna). With the Lok Sabha (May) and Vidhan Sabha (October) elections scheduled in Haryana this year, the party and the new CM have tried their best to maintain a balance in terms of caste and regional representation in the state cabinet.
The new council of ministers includes two Punjabis – Sudha and Trikha (a Punjabi-Brahmin, also the only woman in the Cabinet). Goel is likely to compensate for the loss of Vij, the trader community. Lal and Bishamber Singh Balmiki are from the SC community, while JP Dalal, Ranjit Singh, and Mahipal Dhanda represent the Jat community. This is significant as the BJP government has always played the non-Jat card under former CM Khattar. The party already played the OBC card when Saini replaced Khattar as state CM.