With Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi resigning on Wednesday, July 6 and his Rajya Sabha term ending a day later, there will be no Muslim face in the Union Council of Ministers and among the BJP's 395 Members of Parliament. Union Ministers Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and RCP Singh submitted their resignations to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, a day before the completion of their Rajya Sabha term, sources said. During a cabinet meeting earlier in the day, Modi lauded both Naqvi and Singh for their contributions to the country during their ministerial tenure, sources said.
President Ram Nath Kovind accepted their resignations and assigned the Minority Affairs Ministry to Smriti Irani and the Steel Ministry to Jyotiraditya Scindia, in addition to their existing portfolios. Naqvi was among the three BJP Muslim MPs whose term ended during the recent round of Rajya Sabha polls to 57 seats across 15 states but none of them was renominated by the party. The term of two others, former Union minister M J Akbar and Syed Zafar Islam has already ended.
After Naqvi was not nominated in the recent Rajya Sabha polls, there has been speculation that he is being considered for the post of vice president, the election for which is scheduled to be held on August 6, or some other key position.
It will be after a long time that the BJP will not have any Muslim MP. This will also be a rare occasion when the Union Council of Ministers will not have a Muslim member. The opposition has been accusing the BJP of not giving adequate representation to Muslims, but the saffron party has maintained that its MPs work for all communities and are not representatives of any religion.
Over the decades, Muslim BJP MPs have had a nominal presence in Parliament. Naqvi himself has been a Rajya Sabha member for three terms, Najma Heptulla for two terms and Shahnawaz Hussain, currentl, a minister in the Bihar government, was elected to Lok Sabha twice. Naqvi was a Lok Sabha member for one term as well. Sikander Bakht, a founder member of the party and one of its first three general secretaries, was a Rajya Sabha member twice.
To questions about the development, BJP minority morcha chief Jamal Siddiqui asserted that politics should not be attached to religion and that MPs are elected as representatives of the people and not of any religion. "So even if someone from our religion or caste is not there, we should understand that our own countrymen are there. Responsibilities keep on changing in the BJP and I am confident that the party will ensure representation of all communities," he said.
Former bureaucrat and once a confidant of Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) supremo Nitish Kumar, RCP Singh resigned on his birthday, one year after joining the Union Cabinet from his party's quota.