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Venkaiah Naidu, Sushma Cabinet ministers

Rediff Political Bureau

Bharatiya Janata Party leaders M Venkaiah Naidu and Sushma Swaraj were appointed Cabinet ministers in a reshuffle on Saturday evening.

Also sworn in at Rashtrapati Bhavan as ministers of state were BJP leaders Shripad Yesso Naik (Goa), Satyabrata Mukherjee (West Bengal), Coimbatore MP P Radhakrishnan and film star-turned-MP U V Krishnam Raju (Andhra Pradesh).

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and many of his colleagues including L K Advani, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Murli Manohar Joshi and former prime minister I K Gujral were present at the brief ceremony.

While four of them -- Naidu, Radhakrishnan, Mukherjee and Krishnam Raju -- took the oath of office in English, Swaraj and Naik did so in Hindi.

With their induction, the strength of the National Democratic Alliance ministry has gone up to 76.

Swaraj returns to the Union Cabinet almost two years to the day. She resigned in October 1998 to take over as Delhi's chief minister. However, after the BJP's debacle in that assembly election, she was not reinducted into the Vajpayee ministry.

In the 1999 general election, Swaraj was chosen to contest the general election against Congress leader Sonia Gandhi in Bellary, Karnataka. She lost, but not before giving Sonia a tough fight. A government berth still eluded her, possibly because Vajpayee did not care much for her husband, former Mizoram governor Swaraj Kaushal who openly criticised the prime minister.

Most political observers felt Swaraj had lost another chance for a return from political Siberia when she criticised both Vajpayee and Home Minister L K Advani -- indirectly, of course -- at the BJP's national convention in Nagpur last month.

This is Naidu's first stint in government. The Telugu leader was mentioned as a possible successor to BJP president Kushabhau Thakre before he was pipped to the post by another Andhra politician, Bangaru Laxman. Naidu had indicated that he was not in the running for a ministerial post thereafter, fearing his political future would be affected if he was made a mere minister of state.

Both Naidu, party spokesman for the last two years, and Swaraj are considered leaders to watch out for in the BJP's corridors of power. They join another from their ranks, IT Minister Pramod Mahajan, in the Cabinet.

Krishnam Raju represents the rice-rich Narsapur constituency in Andhra Pradesh. He is the Telugu filmland's equivalent of Vinod Khanna. He began his career as a villain, then became a successful hero. Raju contested the Narsapur seat on a Congress ticket in 1991, but lost

Radhakrishnan's appointment was expected after Tamil Nadu MP and Power Minister P Rangarajan Kumaramangalam's death in August.

Vajpayee -- who will undergo knee replacement surgery on October 10 -- did not rule out the further expansion of his ministry. "There cannot be any cap on the strength of this ministry. I am heading the biggest-ever coalition government," he said.

Asked if he would reinduct Uma Bharti as a minister, he added that the Bhopal MP is currently resting at Kedarnath. He added that he had decided not to forward her resignation from Parliament to the Speaker.

This is the second reshuffle undertaken since the prime minister assumed office on October 14 last year. Saturday's shuffle was meant to fill the vacancies caused by Kumaramangalam's death and the resignations of Ram Jethmalani, Uma Bharti and Bangaru Laxman. Unlike Saturday's event, where only BJP MPs were sworn in, no BJP leader made it to the ministry in the first reshuffle.

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