BHOPAL: Five days after the ruling BJP swept all 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, five newly-elected LS members from the state made it to Modi 3.0 council of ministers on Sunday.
All the five MPs are multiple time LS members, including former CM and sixth-time MP from Vidisha Shivraj Singh Chouhan, fourth-time MP from Tikamgarh(SC) seat Dr Virendra Kumar Khatik, fifth-time MP from Guna Jyotiraditya Scindia, second-time MPs from Dhar(ST) and Betul(ST) seat Savitri Thakur and Durga Das Uike respectively.
On expected lines, Chouhan (BJP’s longest serving CM in the country) who won by a massive 8.21 lakh margin from Vidisha, made it to the union cabinet for the first time. His ascendency to union cabinet minister within six months of being replaced as CM by Dr Mohan Yadav, meant the fulfilment of PM Modi’s two month-old promise of taking him to Delhi for important assignment.
Sixty-five-year-old Chouhan may possibly get the agriculture or women and child development portfolio. wo other entrants from MP in the union cabinet, 70-year-old Dr Virendra Kumar and 52-year-old Jyotiraditya Scindia were both ministers in the Modi 2.0 regime also.
Hailing from the Scheduled Caste Khatik community, Kumar (who was also part of the first Modi government) won from Tikamgarh(SC) seat of Bundelkhand region for the fourth time in a row, this time by over 4 lakh votes. Prior to representing the Tikamgarh (SC) seat, he had won from the adjoining Sagar seat also four times in row, making him the eighth-time parliamentarian from the state.
Scindia made it to the Modi-led union cabinet for second time in a row, this time not as a Rajya Sabha member, but by winning 5.40 lakh votes from his Guna seat (which he lost as Congress candidate in 2019).
Forty-six-year-old Savitri Thakur is not just one of the six women LS members, but also among the recently elected six tribal MPs from the state. The other minister is 60-year-old Durga Das Uike.
While Chouhan and Scindia hail from the OBC segment, Thakur and Uike represent the 21% tribal population of the state, while Kumar comes from the 16% Scheduled Caste population.
However, there was no representative from the upper caste (which had seven MPs, five of them Brahmins and one Kshatriya), particularly when the second time Khajuraho MP and state BJP chief VD Sharma was also being counted among the frontrunners for induction in the Team Modi 3.0.