Babul Supriyo, 7 others in Mamata’s new cabinet after reshuffle

Against the backdrop of the sacking of senior minister Partha Chatterjee – arrested in school recruitment scam, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today carried out a reshuffle of her council of ministers inducting eight new faces, five of them with cabinet rank, including singer-turned-politician Babul Supriyo.

This was the first reshuffle of Mamata's ministerial council since TMC returned to power in West Bengal for a third consecutive tenure in May last year with a landslide win in the assembly elections, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

The cabinet ministers sworn in today at a ceremony at the Raj Bhavan in Kolkata are Babul Supriyo, who shifted from BJP to TMC last year, Partha Bhowmick, Snehasis Chakraborty, Udayan Guha and Pradip Majumdar.

Supriyo, who quit BJP after being dropped from the federal ministerial council, is TMC legislator from south Kolkata's Ballygunge assembly constituency in Kolkata.

Supriyo had lost the assembly poll as a BJP candidate in 2021 and won from Ballygunge in a by-poll later caused by the death of TMC veteran Subrata Mukherjee.

Partha Bhowmick and Snehasish Chakraborty are considered close to Mamata's nephew and TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.

Udayan Guha is a former pro-left Forward Bloc leader who joined TMC after the 2016 assembly polls.

The lone woman in today's ministerial reshuffle is Birbaha Hansda, a Santal woman from Jhargram, who has been elevated from deputy minister to minister of state. Tajmul Hossain was the lone Muslim legislator to figure in today's exercise and was also made minister of state.

Last Monday, Mamata had carried out a major overhaul in her party, an exercise which also had some imprints of Abhishek Banerjee. In the organisational reshuffle, the leadership of 16 out of the 35 districts were changed.

A close aide of Mamata, Partha Chatterjee was in charge of five key departments including industry, commerce, and enterprises and parliamentary affairs before his removal from the cabinet.