West Bengal (The Stellar News): On Wednesday, Mamata Bnerjee, the CM of West Bengal, reshuffled her government and welcomed nine new members. Babul Supriyo, Snehasis Chakraborty, Partha Bhowmick, Udayan Guha, Pradip Mazumder, Tajmul Hossain, and Satyajit Barman are among the nine ministers. Birbaha Hansda and Biplab Roy Chowdhury – took oath as Ministers with independent charges.
The party is under fire for the arrest of senior minister Partha Chatterjee by the ED over the school job scam, which prompted the first cabinet reshuffle since the TMC returned to power for the third consecutive term last year. Banerjee carried out a significant reshuffle inside her party on Monday and declared a cabinet change on Wednesday. There may also be some portfolio changes among the current cabinet ministers.
Apart from Supriyo, district-level TMC leaders — Snehashish Chakraborty, Partha Bhowmik, Udayan Guha and Pradip Majumder — got minister berths after the cabinet reshuffle
“There have only been a handful of cabinet reshuffles in the past 11 years, and even those were modest ones. However, this time, things are different. Plans to add four to five new members and remove a comparable number from the cabinet have never been made. Therefore, this is probably going to be one of the greatest reshuffles since our party won the state’s election”, declared a senior TMC MLA.
Babul Supriyo, a former Union minister and BJP MP who quit the saffron party and joined the TMC after being dropped from the Union cabinet last year, is presently a TMC MLA from the Ballygunge assembly constituency in Kolkata. Tapas Ray, a former minister of state for parliamentary affairs, has been with the TMC since its formation in 1998. He was made the MoS, of parliamentary affairs after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections but was not inducted into the cabinet after TMC came to power for the third consecutive term last year.
Ray was relieved of his organisational responsibilities in Kolkata North organisational district.
Partha Bhowmick and Snehasis Chakraborty, considered close to TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee in the party circles, have been relieved of their organisational responsibilities in North 24 Parganas and Hooghly districts respectively. Udayan Guha, a former Forward Bloc leader who had joined TMC after the 2016 assembly polls, is a frontrunner for induction into the cabinet from north Bengal.
Son of former Left Front minister Kamal Guha, he is presently one of the tallest TMC leaders in the Cooch Behar district.
Partha Chatterjee, who has been relieved of ministerial duties, was in charge of five key departments including industry, commerce and enterprises and parliamentary affairs. For a brief period, Banerjee supervised the panchayat and PHE departments as well as consumer affairs and self-help group and self-employment departments following the death of in-charge ministers Subrata Mukherjee and Sadhan Pandey respectively.
At present, these departments are being held by other ministers.
Report: Deepanjot Kaur (Under Training)
