Kangana Ranaut becomes BJP’s first MP, Rahul Gandhi, in Parliament’s Defence Committee
Parliament Committee on Defense: On Thursday, the Rajya Sabha Secretariat announced through a notification that actor-turned-politician and BJP parliamentarian Kangana Ranaut has been named in the committee on information technology (IT). Congress MP Rahul Gandhi has been renamed to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defense.
Mr. Gandhi, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House now, was a member of the Defense Committee in the previous Lok Sabha proposal.setOnline = WINAPI. The committee will be chaired by BJP MP Radha Mohan Singh. Congress has got four committee chairmanships in all, with its ex-Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor heading the panel on External Affairs.
The Congress will also head the agriculture, animal husbandry, and food processing committees (former Punjab CM Charanjit Channi), women, children, youth, and sports committees (Digvijaya Singh), as well as a rural and panchayati raj committee (Saptagiri Sankar Ulaka). Sonia Gandhi, a seven-time MP and ex-head of the Congress, goes unmentioned.
Important committees such as Defense, Finance, Home, Coal, Mines, and Steel, and Communications and IT, of which Ms. Ranaut is a member, will be chaired by members of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. Radha Mohan Das Agrawal will be in charge of home affairs. Pro-Tem Speaker Bhartruhari Mahtab will chair the esteemed Standing Committee on Finance.
The committees on coal, mines and steel, and water resources will be chaired by former union ministers Anurag Thakur and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, with Nishikant Dubey appointed to head communications and information technology.
Following a fierce dispute over Facebook’s policies on hate speech on its platform during the previous Lok Sabha, Mr. Dubey and Congressman Shashi Tharoor were replaced as the chairman of the committee in 2022 by a BJP MP.
Along with other opposition groups and leaders, Jaya Bachchan of the Samajwadi Party and fellow actress Ms. Ranaut are members of the Communications and IT committee. Joining the two is Priyanka Chaturvedi, a member of the Shiv Sena party, which is headed by the former chief minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray.
On that committee is Trinamool MP Mahua Moitra, whose disqualification from the last Lok Sabha garnered media attention. Food and Public Distribution, as well as Industry and Consumer Affairs, will be chaired by DMK members Tiruchi Siva and Kanimozhi of Tamil Nadu.
Several BJP allies have been assigned committee chairmanship roles. The BJP won the general election in April-June because of 53 seats from its partners in the National Democratic Alliance. Transport, Tourism, and Culture will be led by Nitish Kumar’s JDU in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP in Andhra Pradesh.
Together, these two parties secured 28 seats in the Lok Sabha.
The NCP group of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and the Shiv Sena faction of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde are announced as the BJP’s state partners ahead of the Maharashtra election later this year. The committees on energy and petroleum and natural gas will be led by party leaders.
Standing committees associated with each department, with members from both parties, operate as “mini parliaments” and monitor the operations of the ministries that are related to them.
A mix of Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha members make up each committee.
