This Article is From Jul 05, 2016

Smriti Irani, 'Most Controversial Minister', Shifted: Foreign Media

Smriti Irani, 'Most Controversial Minister', Shifted: Foreign Media

Smriti Irani had been engulfed in several controversies over her tenure at the helm of the agency, including her public Twitter spats with opponents and journalists. (File Photo)

New Delhi: Smriti Irani, India's controversial and most trolled minister, lost her important portfolio on Tuesday in a sweeping cabinet reshuffle that aims to reboot the two-year-old government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The agency she formerly led, the Human Resource Development Ministry, oversees education. It is popularly called the battleground ministry because it is a key portfolio for Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which believes that education must be cleansed of a leftist bias and history textbooks must be rid of its Euro-centric curriculum.

But Irani, a former TV soap star, had been engulfed in several controversies over her tenure at the helm of the agency, including her public Twitter spats with opponents and journalists, her dodgy college credentials, her high-handed treatment of heads of universities and her clampdown on campus protests.

She has been shifted to the somewhat-less-high-profile Textiles Ministry.

"Smriti Irani is one of the big losers in this cabinet reshuffle. She loses her all-important ministry," announced the India Today news television channel as the news broke.

"The evidence against her mishandling of the ministry was mounting," said Siddharth Varadarajan, a political analyst on the channel.

The changes in Modi's cabinet also include the introduction of 19 new ministers, several from lower-caste groups, to help his party win crucial state elections scheduled for next year.

Officials said the cabinet reshuffle followed a hard-eyed performance appraisal by Modi of each minister's work. Junior environment minister Prakash Javadekar takes over from Irani at the Human Resource Development Ministry.

During his tenure, Javadekar was criticized for easing environmental permissions for big industrial and infrastructure projects and diluting the forest protection rights of communities. He, however, earned praise for launching India's first air-quality index.

Irani, a young, articulate leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party, is known for fiery, crowd-pleasing speeches and is likely to be used as a campaigner for the key election in the northern bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh next year. Some party members said that could be why Irani has been moved to a lighter ministry.

Other portfolio changes included the ministries of law, communication, information and broadcasting.

© 2016 The Washington Post

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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