NEW DELHI: Already the PMO is working with secretary-level officers to ensure that a plan is ready on the decisions that the new Cabinet will take post 4 June when results are declared.
The next list of Cabinet Ministers who will work with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, if the Bharatiya Janata Party wins its third consecutive general elections, as is being widely expected, will have a significant number of new faces.
While the Ministry of Home Affairs, presently headed by Amit Shah, is unlikely to witness any change, the other ministries including External Affairs, Defence and Finance might see a new leadership in “Modi 3.0”, with a few of the top Cabinet faces being given the charge of other ministries or being dropped.
The Prime Minister is known for doing his homework well before the deadline and planning his execution months in advance.
BJP and sources familiar with the matter said that the new Cabinet will have individuals who have been on the radar of the PM for a long time and have time and again proved their commitment and intelligence.
The names have been selected while keeping the BJP’s succession line and future in mind so that the party has a series of leaders who will be ready when the delimitation exercise results are out sometime in 2027.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has stated that the census and the delimitation exercise will be undertaken after the general elections. The number of Lok Sabha seats has not increased since 1977 and it is expected that the number of Lok Sabha seats will go somewhere around 800 from the present 543, post the delimitation exercise.
In December 2019, the former President of India, the late Pranab Mukherjee had raised the issue of increasing the number of members in the Lower House from 543 to 1,000 in order to give adequate representation to the population of India.
The new Parliament House, which was inaugurated by PM Modi last year in May, has been built to accommodate 888 seats in the Lok Sabha chamber and 384 in the Rajya Sabha chamber. The Lok Sabha chamber is able to house 1,272 members in case of a joint session.
Already since becoming the Prime Minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has given important responsibilities to non-politicians within the party and in his Cabinet and this trend, sources said, will become more prominent so that the benefits of inputs provided by these domain specialists on improving governance continue.
The average age of the present Modi Cabinet is 58 years. If the PM wins the elections, this number is expected to go down, with the PM looking to include young faces. But it will also depend on how many suitable young candidates match the criteria.
It is pertinent to mention that while BJP leaders, the PM and the Cabinet Ministers are campaigning for elections, the Prime Minister’s Office is already working with secretary-level officers of various departments to ensure that a plan is ready, with the modalities of the decisions that the new Cabinet will take post 4 June when the results of the elections are declared. Many of these decisions will be based on the promises made in BJP’s “Sankalp Patra” or the party manifesto that was released last week.
Even now, officials, both in the PMO and in various other ministries, are working till late night as a deadline for all action that needs to be taken has been set. The Modi 3.0 government, if formed, sources aware of the planning said, will take “swift and big” policy decisions, which will also impact the top bureaucracy, within six months of being sworn in.