Left govts take oath in WB, Kerala on May 18

New Delhi, May 17: Left Front ministries will take oath in West Bengal and Kerala, and Congress' N Rangaswamy will be sworn in as Chief Minister in Pondicherry tomorrow.

DMK chief M Karunanidhi had already taken oath of office in Tamil Nadu at the head of a 31-member ministry on May 13 and in Asom Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi had been sworn in on May 14.

Headed by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, 44 ministers of the seventh successive Left Front government in West Bengal will take oath tomorrow, a third of them are new faces.

Thirty-three of the nominees will be ministers of cabinet rank.

There are 15 freshers in the new ministry; 14 from the previous government have been dropped. There will be three women in the ministry -- one of Cabinet rank and two ministers of state.

Front Committee Chairman Biman Basu told reporters in Kolkata that Mr Hashim Abdul Halim has been chosen as the Speaker and Mr Bhakti Bhushan Ghosh as his Deputy. Mr Syed Mohammad Mohsin has been named Chief Whip of the Left Front.

The nine-party Left Front, which has ruled West Bengal since 1977, had bagged a whopping 235 seats of the 293 for which elections were held, leaving just 29 to the main opposition Trinamool Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance.

The Congress got 21 while eight went to smaller parties and independents.

In Kerala, the 19-member Left Democratic Front (LDF) ministry will be headed by CPI-M Polit Bureau member V S Achuthanandan.

The CPI(M), which heads the LDF, will have a major share of 12 ministerial berths, including the Chief Minister. The Communist Party of India (CPI) will have four and the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Janata Dal(S) and the Kerala Congress (J) one each.

The three minor constituents of the LDF, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Congress (S) and the Kerala Congress (S) having one legislator each will have no representation in the Cabinet.

The post of the Assembly Speaker will go to CPI(M)'s K Radhakrishnan, a former minister.

The LDF had swept the Congress led UDF out of power in the state in results declared on May 11, winning 98 of the 140 Assembly seats.

Names of the Ministers and the Speaker except those from the Janata Dal (S) were formally announced by LDF Convener Paloli Mohammed Kutty at a news conference in Thiruvananthapuram.

Besides Mr Achuthanandan, the CPI(M) nominees in the Cabinet are Mr Paloli Mohammed Kutty, Mr Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, Mr M A Baby, Dr T M Thomas Isaac, Mr A K Balan, Mrs P K Sreemathi, Mr P K Gurudasan, Mr S Sarma, Mr G Sudhakaran, Mr Elamaram Karim and Mr M Vijayakumar.

In Pondicherry, Mr N Rangasamy will take oath as the 15th Chief Minister. Since the Congress party is yet to finalise the list of ministers following demand from several legislators for a cabinet berth, the rest of the cabinet members will be sworn in later.

UNI