New Delhi: With their Rajya Sabha terms set to expire, Union ministers Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Ram Chandra Prasad Singh have resigned from the Union cabinet. President Ram Nath Kovind accepted their resignations with immediate effect, according to a Rashtrapati Bhavan statement on Wednesday.
Minority affairs minister Naqvi and steel minister Singh submitted their resignations to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, a day before the completion of their Rajya Sabha term.
A Rashtrapati Bhavan statement said as advised by the prime minister, the president has directed that Smriti Zubin Irani is assigned the charge of the minority affairs, in addition to her existing portfolio. Jyotiraditya Scindia has been assigned the charge of the Ministry of Steel, in addition to his existing portfolio.
With Naqvi’s resignation on Wednesday and his Rajya Sabha term ending a day later, there will be no Muslim in the Union council of ministers or the BJP’s 395 members of parliament.
Naqvi, who later submitted his resignation to Modi, was among the three BJP Muslim MPs whose term ended during the recent round of Rajya Sabha polls to 57 seats across 15 states. None of them was renominated by the party.
The term of two others – former Union minister M.J. Akbar and Syed Zafar Islam – has already ended.
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The opposition has been accusing the BJP of not giving adequate representation to Muslims, but the saffron party has maintained that its MPs work for all communities and are not representatives of any religion.
Over the decades, Muslim BJP MPs have had a nominal presence in Parliament. Naqvi himself has been a Rajya Sabha member for three terms, Najma Heptulla for two terms and Shahnawaz Hussain, currently a minister in the Bihar government, was elected to the Lok Sabha twice. Naqvi was a Lok Sabha member for one term as well.
Sikander Bakht, a founder member of the party and one of its first three general secretaries, was a Rajya Sabha member twice.
(With PTI inputs)