India’s new government has a new cabinet that is the old cabinet.
The ministers for home, defence, foreign affairs and finance will be the same.
The Big Four are the most important as these make up the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS)—and Messrs Shah (Amit), Singh (Rajnath) and Jaishankar (S.) and Ms Sitharaman (Nirmala) have retained their respective prestige portfolios.
Additionally, road and highways will again be managed by Nitin Gadkari; railways by Ashwini Vaishnaw; commerce and industry by Piyush Goyal; and law by Arjun Ram Meghwal.
Even where portfolios have been shuffled, ministers have been retained: readers will remember names like Kiren Rijiju, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Giriraj Singh...
Some famous names are gone, like Smriti Irani and Rajeev Chandrasekhar— at least for now; but this is because they lost in high-profile contests.
No reason has been given for moving around those ministers who have been retained but shifted.
Presumably this has been done to accommodate allies — the Telugu Desam (civil aviation), the Janata Dal (Secular) (steel), the Janata Dal (United) (micro, medium and small industries), the Lok Janshakti Party (food processing), the Shiv Sena (ayurveda and yoga) — or to bring in former BJP chief ministers like Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh (agriculture) and Manohar........