Shiv Sena’s Raut comments on Modi’s Cabinet shuffle

‘PM ought to be thankful to Shiv Sena, NCP for providing Council of Ministers with new faces’

In a sly dig at , Shiv Sena MP and spokesperson Sanjay Raut on Thursday said that the PM and the Bharatiya Janata Party ought to grateful to the Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) for having supplied them with leaders in the new Cabinet. Four Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders from Maharashtra were inducted in the Council of Ministers, including the Sena’s bete noire Narayan Rane, who has been made a Union Minister, while Kapil Patil, Dr. Bhagwat Karad and Bharati Pawar were inducted as Ministers of State (MoS). “The BJP really ought to be thankful to the NCP and Sena as three of the four new faces from Maharashtra in the freshly-constituted council were either associated with the Sena, the NCP or the Congress at one point of time in their careers… Kapil Patil and Bharati Pawar are NCP ‘products’ while Mr. Rane was a Shiv Sainik and a Congressman before joining the BJP. However, we congratulate the new Ministers and hope that they succeed in their new responsibilities,” said Mr. Raut.