Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today inducted eight JD-U MLAs as Cabinet ministers, leaving out ally BJP and fuelling speculation of a rift between the two parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are now 33 ministers in the Nitish Cabinet, up from 25. The newly appointed ministers are Ashok Choudhary, Shyam Rajak, Narendra Narayan Yadav, Sanjay Jha, Ramsewak Singh, Lakshmeshwar Rai, Neeraj Kumar and Bima Bharti. Bharti is the only woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Governor Lalji Tandon administered the oath of office and secrecy to the ministers at a simple ceremony at the Raj Bhavan. Five of the eight are first-time ministers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Cabinet expansion came two days after the Janata Dal-United chief decided that his party would not join Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s new government because it was offered just one seat a \u201csymbolic\u201d representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nitish Kumar clarified that there was no split in the NDA. \u201cThe BJP has decided that induction of their quota in the Cabinet will be done later,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But some JD-U leaders said the CM was upset by the way the BJP had offered \u201csymbolic representation\u201d in the Modi government though the JD-U won 16 of the 17 Lok Sabha seats it contested. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nitish Kumar, his supporters believe, has sent a message to the BJP that the JD-U is the \u201cbig brother\u201d in Bihar and he would be the face of the NDA in the next Assembly elections. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today inducted eight JD-U MLAs as Cabinet ministers, leaving out ally BJP and fuelling speculation of a rift between the two parties. There are now 33 ministers in the Nitish Cabinet, up from 25. The newly appointed ministers are Ashok Choudhary, Shyam Rajak, Narendra Narayan Yadav, Sanjay Jha, Ramsewak Singh, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62857,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62855\/revisions\/62857"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}