Pushkar Singh Dhami will be sworn in as the chief minister of Uttarakhand for a second consecutive term today at a grand ceremony to be held at the Parade Ground in Dehradun. Apart from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, BJP president JP Nadda, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Himachal Pradesh counterpart Jai Ram Thakur will attend the ceremony.
Having decided to retain Pushkar Singh Dhami as the chief minister, the BJP has now moved on to the next job at hand, cabinet formation in Uttarakhand. As the party leaders are busy picking up MLAs for ministerial berths, the media continues to speculate about the look of Dhami’s new cabinet, which is likely to be a combination of old and new faces. At least three new inductions in Dhami’s new cabinet are a certainty. As Harak Singh Rawat and Yashpal Arya, who were members of the last cabinet, joined the Congress ahead of the Assembly polls and former minister Swami Yatishwaranand lost his seat, the party needs to pick up three new faces to fill the slots that were occupied by them.
Probables who could be brought in for the three slots include former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna's son and Sitarganj MLA Saurav Bahugua, former chief minister Bhuvan Chandra Khanduri's daughter and Kotdwar MLA Ritu Khanduri Bhushan and Dilip Singh Rawat, who scored an emphatic win over Harak Singh Rawat's daughter-in-law, Anukriti Gusain, in Lansdowne. All of them will make their debut as ministers if inducted into Dhami's new cabinet. Old faces likely to be retained are Satpal Maharaj, Dhan Singh Rawat, Rekha Arya and Arvind Pandey, who were all members of Dhami's last cabinet.