A day before the Lok Sabha election date is to be announced, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on March 15 expanded his Cabinet, inducting nine Ministers from his party JD(U) and 12 from the ruling ally BJP. Earlier, along with Mr. Kumar and two Deputy Chief Ministers from the BJP quota, six other Ministers were in the Cabinet, which can have a maximum of 36 Ministers in the 243-member Assembly.
The Cabinet expansion comes 46 days after the new NDA government was formed in the State on January 28, 2024 after Mr. Kumar severed ties with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and rejoined hands with the BJP. It was Mr. Kumar’s fifth political volte-face in a decade to remain in power. All new Ministers vouched after the oath-taking ceremony that the NDA would win all 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in the coming general elections. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the NDA had won 39 out of 40 seats in the State. The Congress had won the lone Kishanganj seat.
