These NDA MPs lost elections yet became ministers. Here’s the politics behind it

While several senior ministers such as Smriti Irani and RK Singh from the previous government were not considered for Modi 3.0 after they failed to secure their berths in the Lok Sabha, the third National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi still has those who lost the parliamentary polls recently.

Two prominent names come from the states where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to win a single seat — Tamil Nadu and Punjab.

L Murugan

Despite an anti-climactic end of the Lok Sabha campaign in Tamil Nadu for the BJP, the state has got representation in the Union cabinet as the NDA ministers were sworn-in on Sunday in New Delhi. L Murugan, the former Tamil Nadu BJP president, was sworn in as a Union minister.

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Earlier in the day, current Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai, who was speculated to get a berth in the Modi 3.0 cabinet, said that despite the party failing to win any seat from the 39 in the state, it would get represented in the central government ministry.

Murugan, 47, lost the Nilgiri constituency, reserved for Scheduled Castes, to the DMK’s A Raja, the former Union minister, in the recent Lok Sabha polls.

However, Murugan, a Rajya Sabha member since 2021, retained his seat in the Union Council of Ministers, which he had joined three years ago during a cabinet reshuffle.

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In the previous government, Murugan was the Union minister of state for information & broadcasting and fisheries, animal husbandry & dairying, months after he was elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha.

He has been rewarded for his contribution to mobilising the BJP cadres in Tamil Nadu in the run up to the 2021 state polls through campaigns such as Vetri Vel Yatra to consolidate Hindu votes. In the subsequent election, the BJP entered the Tamil Nadu Assembly after 20 years, winning four of the 20 seats it had contested in the state in alliance with the AIADMK. Murugan himself, however, had lost the Assembly polls as well.

Ravneet Singh Bittu

Ravneet Bittu, 48, entered politics after his meeting with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in 2007, when the latter told him that he must not let the sacrifice of Bittu’s grandfather Beant Singh, the former Punjab chief minister, who was assassinated by pro-Khalistani terrorists in 1995. Bittu was back then running a cement production unit in Punjab.

Bittu won three Lok Sabha elections for the Congress in 2009 (from Anantpur Sahib), 2014 and 2019 (from Ludhiana on both occasions). Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Bittu joined the BJP. He said he didn’t want to remain in the Opposition camp as he wanted to contribute to the development of Punjab.

The BJP couldn’t win a single seat from Punjab’s 13 Lok Sabha constituencies. The BJP has preferred Bittu over big guns like Preneet Kaur, the former Patiala MP and the wife of former Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh, Hans Raj Hans and Taranjit Singh Sandhu the former diplomat.