Nitish likely to expand Cabinet on July 24, with two faces each from Cong, RJD

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is likely to expand his Cabinet on July 24 with the induction of four new faces, two each from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress, a minister privy to the development said on Friday.

Bhakta Charan Das, Congress’s in charge of party affairs in Bihar, and state Congress president Akhilesh Prasad Singh are scheduled to arrive in capital Patna on Saturday after getting the names of party leaders to be sworn in as ministers approved by party president Mallikarjun Kharge, party leaders said, while declining to divulge the names.

Congress legislature party (CLP) leader Shakeel Ahmad Khan said the party was anticipating the Cabinet expansion any day, as Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, during their meeting with CM Nitish Kumar and his deputy Tejashwi Prasad Yadav in Patna on June 23, had reminded them about accommodating Congress leaders in the Cabinet at the earliest.

Another senior Congress leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the party has proposed to elevate one Brahmin face and another from the other backward classes (OBCs) as its two new ministers.

Asked for his response, RJD spokesman Shakti Singh Yadav just said it was the CM’s prerogative. “However, we hope the CM decides the date after consulting leaders of constituents of the ruling alliance,” said Yadav.

However, a senior RJD MLA, who also didn’t want to be named, claimed the party had finalized two names, one from the OBC, to be inducted into the cabinet. He also hinted that RJD might reshuffle portfolios among its ministers and even drop one or two ministers.

This will be the third cabinet expansion by Nitish Kumar ever since he snapped ties with BJP and took over as the leader of the Mahagathbandhan (MGB) and took oath as the CM on August 10, 2022, along with Tejashwi Prasad Yadav as his deputy.

The Cabinet was first expanded on August 16 when 29 leaders of the alliance took oath as ministers.

More recently, on June 16, Ratnesh Sada of Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) was sworn in as minister to fill up the vacancy created by the departure of Santosh Kumar Suman, son of former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi and president of Hindustani Awam Morcha-Secular (HAM-S), which quit the ruling alliance and has since joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Currently, there are a total of 31 ministers in the Bihar government, including the CM.

As per the strength of the state assembly, the state can have a maximum of 36 ministers.

The Mahagathbandhan government, after coming to power in August last year, had a total of 33 ministers, of which three — Sudhakar Singh, Kartik Kumar and Santosh Kumar Suman — have since resigned.

The alliance government in Bihar has JD(U), RJD and Congress as its main constituents and is supported by Left parties from the outside.

In the 2020 assembly polls in the state, the NDA, with JD(U) and BJP as its main constituents, had won comfortably and formed the government, which lasted till the allies fell out in August 2022.