The third Modi cabinet was sworn in on Sunday, and thirty-three of its members are first-timers, at least six of them come from well-known political families.
Three former chief ministers, HD Kumaraswamy (Karnataka), Manohar Lal Khattar (Haryana), and Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh), are among those making their maiden appearance on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s council of ministers.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj have both represented Vidisha, where Chouhan is a five-time member of parliament.
In addition, he has been Madhya Pradesh’s chief minister for the longest.
Khattar, a former pracharak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), held two terms as Haryana’s chief minister. Following the government’s withdrawal of support for ally JJP, he resigned from his position in March.
The allies comprise seven of the first-time ministers in the Modi government: K Rammohan Naidu and Chandrasekhar Pemmasani of the TDP; Lalan Singh and Ram Nath Thakur of the JDU; Jayant Chaudhary of the RLD; Chirag Paswan of the LJP; and HD Kumaraswamy of the JD(S).
The 45-year-old national chairman of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Jayant Chaudhary, is the son of former Union minister Chaudhary Ajit Singh and the grandson of India’s fifth prime minister, Chaudhary Charan Singh.
Prior to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Chaudhary—who had previously been connected to Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party—joined the NDA. In February of this year, the BJP honored his grandpa with the Bharat Ratna, a posthumous honor.
The RLD won two seats in western Uttar Pradesh, Baghpat and Bijnor, under his direction, by significant margins of more than 4,88,000 and 37,500 votes, respectively.
The son of one of Bihar’s most powerful figures, the late Ram Vilas Paswan, Chirag Paswan is about to take the helm as a minister in the federal administration. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he defeated his father, who had held the Hajipur seat for a record nine times, by a margin of 1.7 lakh votes.
His party, the LJP (Ram Vilas), made a stunning recovery from the turbulent time after Ram Vilas Paswan’s death in 2020 by winning all five seats it ran for in Bihar while under the NDA.
The son of prominent socialist activist and former Bihar chief minister Karpoori Thakur, who was granted the Bharat Ratna earlier this year, is Janata Dal (United) member Ram Nath Thakur.
The 74-year-old leader, who hails from Samastipur, is well-known for his strong relationship with Nitish Kumar and his sway over the most marginalized groups. From 2005 until 2010, he was a minister in Bihar before.
The newest member of the Modi administration is Ravneet Singh Bittu, the grandson of the late chief minister of Punjab, Beant Singh, who was killed in 1995 by a militant Khalistani group.
In advance of the Lok Sabha elections, Bittu moved from the Congress to the BJP. He ran from Ludhiana but was defeated by Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh by more than twenty thousand votes.
Bittu (48) served as the Lok Sabha representative for Punjab’s Anandpur Sahib from 2009 to 2014 as well as the Ludhiana representative from 2014 to 2024.
Sworn in as a Union minister was Raksha Khadse, the daughter-in-law of prominent NCP leader Eknath Khadse, who was instrumental in BJP’s establishment in Maharashtra.
She won it three times in a row, holding onto her Raver seat. After winning the 2014 general elections, she and Heena Gavit, both 26 years old, became the youngest Members of Parliament. At the age of 37, her spouse Nikhil Khadse is said to have committed suicide.
After ten years, Jitin Prasada, who was among the youngest ministers in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government, rejoins the Union Council of Ministers. In 2021, he left the Congress to join the BJP.
In 1991 and 1994, Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao, respectively, received political advice from his father Jitendra Prasada, a former vice-president of the Congress.
Rajiv Ranjan, also referred to as Lalan Singh, is a reliable ally of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who holds the Munger Lok Sabha constituency.
Suresh Gopi, the actor-turned-politician who made history by becoming the first Kerala-born BJP MP, is another of the new faces.
Unexpectedly, Tokhan Sahu, a Chhattisgarh native and first-time MP from Bilaspur, was added to Modi’s new cabinet. Sahu, who has been involved in politics for the past thirty years, has never made a lot of noise.
The first-timers from the BJP are Kamlesh Paswan (Uttar Pradesh), Sukanta Majumder (West Bengal), Durga Das Uikey (Madhya Pradesh), Raj Bhushan Chaudhary (Bihar), Satish Dubey (Bihar), Sanjay Seth (Jharkhand), C R Paatil (Gujarat), Bhagirath Chaudhary (Rajasthan), Harsh Malhotra (Delhi), V Somanna (Karnataka), Savitri Thakur (MP).
Prataprao Jadhav (Maharashtra), George Kurian (Kerala), Kirti Vardhan Singh (UP), Bhupathi Raju Srinivasa Varma (Andhra Pradesh), Nimuben Bambhniya (Gujarat), Murlidhar Mohol (Maharashtra), Pabitra Margherita (Assam) and Bandi Sanjay Kumar (Telangana) are also among the BJP first-timers.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance administration placed a strong premium on continuity and experience in its Cabinet, while also recognizing allies, when Modi took office as prime minister on Sunday, marking the beginning of a record-tying third term.
Senior BJP figures who took an oath as cabinet ministers at Rashtrapati Bhavan with Modi were Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah, Nitin Gadkari, Nirmala Sitharaman, and S Jaishankar. All of these individuals are ministers in the Modi 2.0 Cabinet.