Mamata to be Sworn in as West Bengal CM, 41 Ministers to Take Oath

Kolkata: The swearing-in ceremony of Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee as the next Chief Minister of West Bengal will be held on Friday at Red Road in Kolkata.

The swearing-in ceremony will be open to the common people. Elaborate security arrangements have been made to prevent any untoward incident.

Besides Mamata, who is likely to keep the home and land portfolio, 41 Trinamool MLAs will also take oath as ministers in the new cabinet. Mamata had met met Governor KN Tripathi on Thursday and handed over a list of the these MLAs.

Though Mamata refused to reveal details of new faces in the cabinet, party insiders claimed that there will be 17 fresh faces. "She carefully made the list of MLAs covering all the districts. This was done to give an equal chance to everybody to serve the people," he said.

Some of the new faces likely to be inducted in the cabinet are: Singer Indranil Sen, Kolkata Mayor Shovan Chatterjee and former Indian cricketer Laxmi Ratan Shukla.

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Union Minister Babool Supriyo, Bangladesh Industry Minister, Bhutan Prime Minister, Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Singh Yadav have confirmed their presence in the ceremony, TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee said.

Mamata is the daughter of freedom fighter Promileswar Banerjee. She came into limelight in 1984 by defeating CPI (M) stalwart Somnath Chatterjee from Jadavpur constituency in her maiden Lok Sabha election contest.

In 1991, she joined former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao's ministry. In 1993, she parted her ways with Rao’s ministry.

In 1998 she quit the Congress and formed the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to take on the Left in West Bengal.

Since then she has been fighting against the Left. From 1998 to 2001 she also joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She was the railway minister from 1999 to 2001 and coal minister for a few months in 2004 in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.

In May 2011, Mamata finally managed to oust the Left Front government from the state.