More than 40 ministers will take oath in the West Bengal assembly today, with a series of old hands and fresh faces expected to liven up the Mamata Banerjee cabinet. The swearing in will take place at the Raj Bhawan in Kolkata. Among the names that the TMC will go for will be Amit Mitra, who was the finance minister under Banerjee in her two previous terms since 2011, veterans leaders such as Subrata Mukherjee, Partha Chatterjee, Firhad Hakim, Jyoti Priya Mallick, Moloy Ghatak, Aroop Biswas, Shashi Panja and Javed Ahmed Khan.
Then there will be the relatively newer faces like former IPS officer Humayun Kabir, former Bengal Ranji captain Manoj Tiwari and Siuli Saha.
The cabinet meet is expected to take place soon after. However, both [Amit] Mitra and CM Banerjee will need to win upcoming bypolls. Mitra did not compete in the polls because of ill-health, and Banerjee herself lost from Nandigram.
The swearing-in will be held under the shadow of Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar sanctioning the CBI prosecution of [Firhad] Hakim, [Subrata] Mukherjee, Madan Mitra and Sovan Chatterjee in the purported Narada sting tapes. Hakim, Mukherjee and Mitra have been re-elected as TMC MLAs in the just-concluded assembly elections, while Chatterjee, who left the TMC to join the BJP, has severed links with both the camps.
The Narada sting tapes, made public before the 2016 assembly elections in West Bengal, were claimed to have been shot in 2014, wherein people resembling TMC ministers, MPs and MLAs were allegedly seen receiving money from representatives of a fictitious company in lieu of promised favours.
-Inputs from PTI