india

Updated: Jun 07, 2019 23:58 IST

A core group of ministers met at defence minister Rajnath Singh’s house on Friday to discuss the upcoming Parliament session and key issues related to the government a day after the Cabinet committees were reconstituted.

Ministers Amit Shah (home), Dharmendra Pradhan (petroleum), Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi (minorities), Ravi Shankar Prasad (law), Narendra Singh Tomar (rural development), and Prahlad Joshi (parliamentary affairs) attended the meeting that lasted over a couple of hours. While it was speculated that this was a meeting of the Cabinet committee on parliamentary affairs, some members of that committee did not attend and denied it was a formal meeting of the body that decides on upcoming legislation.

“The minister was called at 6pm to come to Rajnath Singh’s house,’’ a minister’s aide said. The meeting ended shortly after 10pm.

While the main thrust of the meeting was the upcoming Parliament session, it was not restricted to that. The issue of who would be the next speaker when the new Lok Sabha starts on June 17 was said to have been taken up as well. Appointments to the post of deputy speaker and the bills to be prioritised were some of the other issues taken up.

The meeting came against the backdrop of Rajnath Singh being brought back to head six Cabinet bodies instead of two as announced earlier on Thursday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Kerala on Friday night and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Japan.

The meeting took place on a day parliamentary affairs minister Prahlad Joshi reached out to the head of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Sonia Gandhi, to facilitate smooth functioning of the House.