Maharashtra cabinet expansion today; over a dozen ministers likely to be inducted

MUMBAI: After initial hiccups and delays, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde will expand his 40-day-old cabinet on Tuesday with over a dozen MLAs being inducted as ministers. According to sources, around half a dozen ministers from the Shinde group and the BJP are slated to take oath on Tuesday in the first phase, and the rest will be inducted later.

Political sources said that nearly half the legislators of Shinde Group-BJP - totalling around 165, including independents and smaller parties - are clamouring for ministerial berths, with a majority of them hoping for Cabinet rank.

Though no names have been confirmed yet, sources claim that senior BJP leaders Sudhir Mungantiwar, Chandrakant Patil, Girish Mahajan are likely to be inducted as new ministers. The other leaders who will likely take oath include Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, Suresh Khade, Atul Moreshwar Save, Mangal Prabhat Lodha, Vijaykumar Gavit and Ravindra Chavan.

From the Shinde faction, Gulab Raghunath Patil, Sada Sarvankar and Deepak Vasant Kesarkar are likely to take oath tomorrow. The move comes ahead of the Monsoon Session of Maharashtra Legislature which is expected to start from Wednesday, though there were some reports of a week`s delay.

The Maharashtra Legislature Secretariat has cancelled all leaves of staffers from August 9-18, directing them to remain present in the office for the monsoon session preparations.

Shinde and Fadnavis took oath on June 30 - a day after the erstwhile Maha Vikas Aghadi regime headed by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray crashed - and since then, they have been running a two-man government for the past 40 days.

Thackeray, his son Aditya Thackeray, party MP Arvind Sawant and other MVA leaders have taken potshots at the proposed cabinet expansion on Tuesday.

Shinde and Fadnavis had a meeting on the issue Monday - a couple of days after they had gone to New Delhi to meet the BJP top leaders - to finalise the thorny cabinet expansion issue, with many senior leaders on both sides staking a claim for ministerial positions.

The Shinde-Fadnavis regime has been under severe attack from the Leader of Opposition Ajit Pawar, the Nationalist Congress Party, Congress and Shiv Sena leaders for the delay in forming the cabinet due to which the state administration has been left paralysed, with no help reaching the farmers and people hit by the recent floods in several parts of the state.