Dehradun: BJP leader Trivendra Singh Rawat, who was on Friday elected as the Legislature Party leader in Uttarakhand, was on Saturday sworn in as the Chief Minister. Nine others were also sworn in as Cabinet ministers.
Governor K K Paul administered the oath of office and secrecy to 56-year-old Trivendra Singh in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah and other national and state party leaders. Congress leader and former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat was also present at the swearing in ceremony.
Rekha Arya and Dhan Singh Rawat take oath as minister of state. Satpal Maharaj, Harak Singh Rawat, Madan Kaushik, Arvind Pandey, Subodh Uniyal, Yashpal Arya and Prakash Pant have been made Cabinet ministers.
The BJP had managed a clean sweep in Uttarakhand by winning 57 out of the 70 seats.
Coupled with his administrative and organisational skills and experience, Trivendra Singh's loyalty to the party and RSS ideology catapulted him to the top post in the state.
He is close to party chief Amit Shah and had helped him during the 2014 Uttar Pradesh campaign, where the BJP had won 71 seats. He has left behind other probables for the CM post like Satpla Maharaj, who left Congress to join BJP in 2014, and Prakash Pant, the first Speaker of the state after it was formed in 2000.
Rawat was appointed the party's national secretary in 2013. He was later made co-incharge of the party's affairs in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. He was BJP in-charge of Jharkhand ahead of the crucial assembly election, a responsibility he discharged well to further strengthen the party leadership's trust in him.
He had wrested the Doiwala seat from Congress with an impressive margin of 24,869 votes to win it for the third time.
