LEAD

More than 45 ministers are likely to take oath along with CM Yogi Adityanath on Friday even as he went to New Delhi from Dehradun after attending the swearing-in ceremony of Pushkar Singh Dhami government on Wednesday for a last-minute brainstorming over the shape and size of his next government.

Sources said that the BJP’s UP core committee after long deliberation had short-listed around 70-odd MLAs which could be included in Yogi Cabinet 2.0. Of these, chances are that between 45 and 48 of them could be inducted in the government.

Amid speculations on various names, sources said that Speaker could be selected from a panel comprising veteran MLAs Ram Naresh Agnihotri, who won from Mainpuri's Bhogaon for the second consecutive time, Surya Pratap Shahi, Satish Mahana and Ashutosh Tandon ‘Gopalji’. The original choice, finance and parliamentary affairs minister Suresh Khanna, is believed to have expressed his desire to stay in the government.

India’s defence acquisition council (DAC), the government’s top weapons procurement body, on Tuesday cleared military proposals worth ₹8,357 crore, including a military satellite, to sharpen the operational capabilities of armed forces, officials familiar with the development said.

The hardware will be sourced indigenously, the defence ministry said in a statement.

The DAC, headed by defence minister Rajnath Singh, accorded its acceptance of necessity (AoN) for equipment including the GSAT-7B satellite for the army, air defence fire control radars, light vehicles and image intensifiers, the officials said. Under India’s defence procurement rules, AoN by the council is the first step towards buying military hardware.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Abhishek Banerjee was questioned for eight long hours by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) today in connection with a coal smuggling case. The parliamentarian was questioned about two firms with alleged links to his family members and foreign bank accounts connected to his wife Rujira Banerjee, sources told media.

His wife has been asked to join the investigation tomorrow in the same case.

Summons was issued to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew and his wife after the Delhi High Court refused to grant them any relief in this case. Abhishek Banerjee has also approached the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court order.

The Centre has told the Supreme Court that some unscrupulous persons are using fake documents to get Covid death compensation and sought direction from the court to allow its agency to undertake sample scrutiny of the documents filed along with claim applications to catch the culprits.

In an application filed by the ministry of home affairs, the Centre said that the connivance of the local level officers appointed to clear the claims could not be ruled out in the illegal rackets to obtain ex-gratia payment on forged documents, which needed to be probed.

“Reports have been received by the central government as well as by the state governments regarding fake/forged claims being submitted by some unscrupulous persons. It is submitted that though this court, considering the pain and plight of the family members of persons who lost their lives due to Covid- 19 infection, on sympathetic, benevolent and humanitarian grounds had directed expeditious payment of the ex-gratia payments to the next of kin of the Covid-19 victims, on production of documents mentioned in court’s order. However, in absence of any verification and scrutiny of the claim forms, some unscrupulous persons in the society started realising such ex-gratia payments on the basis of forged and fake claim documents,” the application said.

Two days after the G-23 dissident group in the Congress openly asked the party to adopt a model of “collective and inclusive leadership and decision-making at all levels” and projected it as the “only way forward”, Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday met Ghulam Nabi Azad to defuse the crisis.

Azad later said Sonia’s place at the helm has not been questioned.

During the hour-long meeting, Azad is learnt to have put forward a set of proposals calling for elections to the Congress Working Committee, making the Central Election Committee an elected body and reviving the defunct Parliamentary Board to ensure that decision-making is collective.