From Haryana, former CM Manohar Lal Khattar, royal scion Rao Inderjit Singh set to be Union ministers

Former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar and Gurgaon MP-elect Rao Inderjit Singh are two Haryana BJP leaders who are likely to be inducted as Union ministers when the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s council of ministers takes oath on Sunday.

When Khattar, 70, was chosen to become the first chief minister of a BJP government in Haryana after the party won an election on its own in 2019, he was considered a dark horse in political circles. In March this year, in a surprise move, the party replaced Khattar with Nayab Singh Saini for the CM’s post with the Assembly elections just a few months away.

Khattar was fielded from the Karnal constituency in the recent Lok Sabha elections and he won by an impressive margin of 2,32,577 votes.

As chief minister, Khattar is credited with trying to ensure recruitment for government jobs through a transparent system and online transfer of government employees, especially teachers. However, the Opposition criticised him for introducing family IDs (Parivar Pehchan Patras) and several web portals, especially one which made it mandatory for the farmers to upload details of their crops on a government website.

Farmers also staged several protests against him when the police took action against those agitating against three central farm laws in 2020-21, and against farmers, especially from Punjab, taking part in a ‘Dilli Chalo’ protest call in February this year.

Khattar belongs to a Hindu Punjabi family that migrated to India during the Partition. According to BJP sources, after the Partition, his father bought a small piece of agricultural land and took up farming in Banyani village in Haryana. As a school-going kid, Khattar used to assist his