Buddhadeb takes oath again as chief minister of West Bengal

Kolkata: Modern communism's poster boy Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was yesterday sworn in as head of the seventh Left Front government in West Bengal even as his predecessor cast a distinct shadow on the reformist chief minister's new Cabinet.

"Brand Buddha" may have been the buzzword for young voters and investors, leading to a landslide mandate for the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led coalition, but in choosing the council of ministers it was former chief minister Jyoti Basu who seems to have prevailed.

Despite his desire for a slim and efficient government with mostly new blood, Bhattacharya was burdened with a 44-member team in which the portfolios of finance, transport and health were retained by the previous ministers despite their mediocre performance.

The new government has 33 Cabinet ministers and 11 ministers of state. Hashim Abdul Halim will again preside over the new assembly as speaker.

Basu, who sat through the swearing in ceremony at Raj Bhavan yesterday, evidently had the last laugh with the induction of names like Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty who does not have a good rapport with Bhattacharya.

But Bhattacharya did manage to bring in 16 new faces and change his IT and higher education ministers.

Among them, the most prominent is Jadavpur University teacher and electronics engineer Debesh Das, a first time legislator, who has been given the charge of IT, a key department for the industry-friendly chief minister.

The chief minister has kept with himself portfolios like home, information and cultural affairs, hill affairs, science and technology, development and planning, minorities development and welfare, horticulture, and personnel and administrative reforms.

Industry Minister Nirupam Sen, who is the second in command in the government and a trusted lieutenant of Bhattacharya in implementing his industrial policies, has retained his portfolio.

The prominent CPM ministers whose portfolios have been changed include Manab Mukherjee and Jogesh Burman who lost the IT and forest departments respectively. Some of the other new faces are Sudarshan Roy Chowdhury (higher education), Partha De (school education), Tapan Roy (mass education and library), Rekha Goswami (self-help) and Rabilal Maitra (law).

Bhattacharya had long been planning a change in the ministry of education, a sector where he admits to a mediocre performance by previous Left Front governments.

However, two other important ministries health and finance have remained with the previous ministers, Surya Kanta Mishra and Asim Dasgupta respectively, belying speculation that the axe would fall on them.