TIL Desk/National/Ahmedabad/ In a first in the Gujarat Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah were on Sunday forced to return the finance portfolio to Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel, following two days of sulking by the latter for being given a second slot in the new Vijay Rupani Cabinet but not the portfolios matching his stature.
Nitin Patel, who is in public life since 1977 and with the BJP from 1980, had withdrawn into a shell at his residence in Ahmedabad for two days without occupying his ministerial mansion on Thursday and Friday after Chief Minister Rupani distributed the portfolios to his new team, and did not give the key finance, urban development and petrochemicals portfolios to him.
Patel had felt slighted way back in 2016, when Rupani, ranked junior to him in the party and experience, was made the chief minister after the forced exit of Anandiben Patel in the wake of the Patidar agitation. He had decided to keep quiet back then. Rupani is considered close to Amit Shah while Anandiben Patel is Shah’s bete noire and Nitin Patel is believed to be in her camp. Inncidentally, the first woman Chief Minister of Gujarat was known to be a confidant of Modi but the circumstances had then forced her to put in her papers.
