Let's note 'stars parade' forming the Maha Cabinet!

Mumbai, December 30: Waking ahead in the Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray's cabinet expansion today, Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar and Shiv Sena's Aaditya Thackeray are slated to take oath as the Dy CM and Cabinet Minister respectively at Vidhan Sabha. While around 35 legislators, 10 of them from the Congress will become part of the ministry, which already has six members besides the Chief Minister, this will be the second time in two months that Ajit Pawar will be taking oath as the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

 

In November, he broke ranks from his party to ally with the BJP and took oath as the deputy of Devendra Fadnavis in a surprise ceremony. But he quit soon after, hours before a Supreme Court-ordered floor test, ending the BJP's 80-hour bid to seize power. Maharashtra can have a maximum of 43 ministers where the size of council of ministers cannot exceed 15 per cent of the total number of MLAs in the state, which is 288.

 

On November 28, Balasaheb Thorat and Nitin Raut of Congress, Eknath Shinde and Subhash Desai of the Shiv Sena and Jayant Patil and Chhagan Bhujbal of the NCP took oath along with Uddhav Thackeray. Today from the Congress, Ashok Chavan, K C Padvi, Vijay Wadettiwar, Amit Deshmukh, Sunil Kadar, Yashomati Thakur, Varsha Gaikwad and Aslam Sheikh, Satej Patil and Vishwajeet Kadam are to take oath.

The Sena-NCP-Congress coalition, dubbed the Maha Vikas Aghadi, came to power after weeks of negotiations between the ideologically mismatched parties who came up with a common minimum agenda. On November 28, Ajit Pawar had attended Uddhav Thackeray's oath ceremony but was not sworn in. His uncle called it a conscious decision.

Ajit Pawar has served as Deputy Chief Minister on two previous occasions, each time when a Congress-NCP alliance was in power. The Congress has also got the Speaker's post, MLA from the Sakoli segment, Nana Patole, was elected unanimously on December 1.