Road and Transport Minister CP Joshi will also be in the driver's seat in the Railway Ministry while Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal will have the additional charge of the law Ministry. The development follows resignation of Pawan Kumar Bansal and Ashwani Kumar from the Union Cabinet on Friday.
Sibal, a lawyer himself, will handle the law Ministry for the first time, while Joshi had held the Railway portfolio temporarily last year after the exit of Trinamool Congress nominee Mukul Roy.
Joshi was at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, ready to fly to Finland when he got a message that he was given the additional charge of the Railway Ministry.
Joshi, who was scheduled to lead a delegation to Finland to sign an MoU in the road transport sector, cancelled the foreign visit in order to assume additional charge on Monday.
These minor tinkerings in Team Manmohan are expected to be followed by a mini Cabinet reshuffle sometime next week to fill up some vacancies caused by the DMK’s exit from the Government and the need to place new nominees in the departments being held as additional charge.
Sources said that Congress president Sonia Gandhi will be meeting senior party leaders soon to discuss the reshuffle. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was virtually forced by Sonia to sack his protégé Ashwani Kumar, will not be part of the deliberations. Sonia's political secretary Ahmed Patel will brief the PM about the outcome of the discussions.
Though Sonia has not commented on the recent political development, the party wants to make sure that she is seen as the person who compelled the PM to act against the tainted ministers.
“Congress president and Rahul Gandhi never tolerate corruption and that is why they took the resignations of the two Ministers,” Congress spokesperson Bhakta Charan Das said. The statement made clear who is the boss in the UPA.
It is a different matter that Sonia Gandhi was present at the Congress Core Group meeting last Sunday where the party decided to back both Bansal and Ashwani Kumar. In fact, when Bansal volunteered to resign after the CBI arrested his nephew in a job-for-cash scam, he was asked to stay on both by the PM and the party.
The Congress leadership will need to explain to the nation why they insisted on defending the two tainted Ministers even at the cost of paralysing the Parliament.
The party could not hold the Opposition responsible for the washout of the second half of the Budget Session when it could have avoided the stalemate by asking these two Ministers to put in their papers in time.
The exit of Ashwani Kumar is unlikely to put the lid on the controversy triggered by the vetting of the CBI status report in the coal scam by him, PMO officials and Attorney General GE Vahanvati.
On the last date of hearing of the case, the Supreme Court had expressed strong reservation on the role of the PMO officials who visited the CBI headquarters to peruse the report. While the Government has indicated it will stand by the AG, it will be extremely difficult for the PM to leave untouched these joint secretaries in view of the SC's observations against them. The SC had observed that the heart of the report was changed by these two officials.
Meanwhile, it emerged on Saturday that in his resignation letter, Bansal maintained he was not aware that his nephew was in contact with Railway Board Member Mahesh Kumar but he still thought it proper to step down.
64-year-old Bansal, who was made Railway Minister in October last year, said he looks forward to an expeditious investigation into the allegations.
The CBI had earlier grilled Bansal’s personal secretary Rahul Bhandari, a 1997 batch Punjab cadre IAS officer who is believed to be privy to all the crucial decisions taken in the Railway Ministry.