Assembly elections done, Modi, Shah to rejig BJP and govt after budget session

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah are likely to rejig their teams after Parliament’s budget session ends on April 12.

Three national secretaries and a vice-president of the BJP have become ministers in Uttar Pradesh. The Uttarakhand chief minister was also in charge of Jharkhand. They will have to quit party posts, which will create vacancies in the team of office-bearers that Amit Shah hasn’t reconstituted after getting re-elected as the BJP president in January last year.

“Any change will happen only after the budget session ends on April 12,” a BJP source said.

There has been buzz about an impending reshuffle of the Union council of ministers, with defence minister Manohar Parrikar returning to Goa as chief minister.

On Monday, three Cabinet committees headed by Modi were restructured in the wake of Parrikar’s resignation. Parrikar was a member of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Security. His name has been replaced on all the three panels with that of finance minister Arun Jaitley who holds the additional charge of defence.

Health minister JP Nadda is also set to move to election-bound Himachal Pradesh as the president of the state BJP unit.

He might quit the ministry to focus on the organisation assignment. The BJP has an undeclared age bar — 75 — for its leaders to get a ministerial job, but Kalraj Mishra, a prominent Brahmin leader, was retained in view of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

He is tipped to be moved to one of the Raj Bhavans.

Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana are yet to get full-time governors.