New Delhi, Jun 10 (EFE).- The first Cabinet meeting of the new Indian government led by Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be held on Monday.
The allocation of portfolios is expected to be done at the meeting, scheduled to be held at 5 pm, local newspaper Indian Express reported.
Modi, along with 71 ministers, were sworn in on Sunday evening at a ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential residence, in the presence of some 8,000 guests, including several heads of state and prime ministers of nations allied to India.
Among the new ministers are several who headed a portfolio in the last government, including Amit Shah, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Rajnath Singh, who were the home, foreign, finance and defense ministers, respectively.
For the first time in 10 years, Modi will have to govern in a coalition, after his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won 240 seats in the recent general elections, falling well short of the 272 seats required for a majority in the lower house of parliament, or Lok Sabha.
This forced the prime minister to seek among his coalition partners, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which is led by the BJP and obtained some 290 seats, in exchange for concessions.
Thus, 11 leaders from the rest of the NDA parties will make up the new government, five of them as head of a ministry.
With his third consecutive term and also the one that is expected to be the most complicated, Modi equals the record of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first president after independence from the British Empire in 1947, who governed the country until his death in 1964. EFE
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