E-Paper
Cong veterans return to power after nine years
Veterans like Pranab Mukherjee, Arjun Singh, Natwar Singh and Ghulam Nabi Azad returned to power after a gap of nine years.
HANS RAJ BHARDWAJ: A trusted lieutenant of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, H R Bhardwaj staged a comeback in his political career after eight long years.
A Congressman to the core and a member of National Executive of Indian Youth Congress from 1957, Bharadwaj had stood like a rock behind Gandhi during the post-emergency black days for the Congress when he had defended then party supremo in many cases.
The 67-year-old party veteran was holding the post of Minister of State for Law, Justice and Company Affairs in the Congress Government headed by Narasimha Rao during 1991-96.
In 1982, he was elected Rajya Sabha marking the beginning of a long innings in the central politics. Three years after his entry into the House of Elders, the politician from Haryana was rewarded with a place in the Council of Ministers headed by Rajiv Gandhi where he held the post for Minister of State for Law and Justice from 1985 to 1989.
Meira Kumar: Daughter of late Jagjivan Ram, a former IFS officer and elected to Lok Sabha from Sasaram constituency in Bihar, she makes her maiden entry into the Union Council of Ministers.
Kumar, who has also represented Delhi's Karol Bagh seat in the Lok Sabha, had a brief association with BJP before returning to the Congress fold.
As a Parliamentarian, the issues closest to her have been uplift of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, women, besides elimination of child labour. Congress veterans Pranab Mukherjee, Arjun Singh, Natwar Singh and Ghulam Nabi Azad along with several other Congress leaders returned to the corridors of power after a gap of nine years in the Manmohan Singh-led coalition government.
Following are the brief profiles of those inducted into the Union Council of Ministers :
Pranab Mukherjee: A Congress strategist and number two in the Indira Gandhi government, the veteran party leader from West Bengal is back in corridors of power under the leadership of a man he had once appointed as RBI Governor.
Having rural roots, the 69-year-old Gandhi family loyalist makes his maiden entry to Lok Sabha in his nearly four-decade political career.
Beginning his career as a Lecturer and having a tryst with journalism, Mukherjee has traversed a long path in the national political spectrum, holding key portfolios in the central governments like Finance, Commerce, Steel and Mines, and External Affairs from 1970s to 1996.
Born in a small village of Kinahar in West Bengal's Birbhum district, the rural school-bred student majored in History and Political Science and later graduated in Law.
Mukherjee, who made his first major break in politics by getting elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1969 and got re-elected four times, had been labelled by his critics as a "minister who has never been elected to Lok Sabha'. But not anymore as he has got elected from Jangipur Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal's Murshidabad district this time when he returned to electoral politics after 24 years.
