Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi was sworn in as the Prime Minister of India for a second term at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Thursday. President Ram Nath Kovind also administered the oath-taking of the new council of ministers.
BJP national president Amit Shah, who won from Gujarat’s Gandhinagar by a record margin joined the council of ministers in the new cabinet this time. Others in the new cabinet includes Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari, Smriti Irani, Prakash Javrekar, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sitharaman, Dr Harshavardhan, PV Joshi, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Giriraj Singh, Mahendra Nath Pandey among others.
S Jaishankar, former foreign secretary, was also sworn-in as a minister in the new cabinet.
There were nearly 8,000 guests who attended the event, including the heads of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Mauritius, Myanmar and Kyrgyztan. Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh were among those who attended the event.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who had initially said she would attend the event, later declined to participate on learning that family members of 52 BJP workers killed in West Bengal who claimed to have died in political clashes had been invited to participate. Banerjee said that the deaths had nothing to do with politics.
