Are the Railway and law Ministries in UPA-II jinxed portfoliosIJ It looks like if one goes by the record that four years of UPA’s second avatar has seen six Railway Ministers and four law Ministers.
On Saturday, a day after Pawan Bansal put in his papers, Surface Transport Minister CP Joshi got the additional charge of Railway Minister for the second time. Mamata Banerjee as the first Railway Minister of UPA-II in May 2009 quit exactly two years later in 2011 after her party ousted CPI(M) in West Bengal and the Trinamool boss moved to Kolkata’s Writers’ Building.
The Ministry remained with her party and Dinesh Trivedi was appointed Railway Minister on July 12 that year. Before he could complete a year in the Rail Bhawan, Banerjee made him quit in March 2012 for presenting an ‘anti-people’ Budget.
Banerjee’s trusted aide Mukul Roy was brought in as the Railway Minister on March 20 and exactly a year and half later he had to resign following Trinamool’s decision to walk out of the UPA on FDI in multi-brand retail issue.
The portfolio returned to the Congress after a gap of 17 years with CP Joshi getting additional charge of the Railways in September 2012. Considered close to Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, Joshi lost his additional charge of the Railway Ministry to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh camp follower Pawan Kumar Bansal. Then Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Bansal was shifted to the Railway Ministry in October.
In less than seven months of moving into the Rail Bhawan, Bansal got embroiled into a controversy and lost his job as Railway Minister on Friday. This paved way for Joshi getting additional charge of Railway Ministry for the second time in less than a year.
Similarly, Karnataka veteran M Veerappa Moily was appointed as the first law Minister of UPA-II on 28 May 2009. Exactly two years later he was shifted to the Corporate Affairs Ministry amidst speculation that his party was not happy with his performance as the law Minister.
Salman Khurshid who replaced Moily as law Minister in May 2011 was moved out to External Affairs Ministry exactly a year and five months later in 2012. Ashwani Kumar, another confidant of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was brought in as law Minister in October 2012 but lost his job on Friday after his continuity became untenable against the backdrop of SC’s observation in Coalgate. The Minister for Communication and Technology Kapil Sibal, who got additional charge of the law Ministry of Saturday, is himself a lawyer.