Rahul Gandhi retains Parliament's Defense Committee, Kangana Ranaut makes debut in Communications panel

The Parliament on Sep 26 restructured its standing committees with the formation of 24 key committees, assigning significant roles to prominent political leaders across party lines.

Senior Congress leader and Member of Parliament (MP) Rahul Gandhi retains his membership of Parliament's Standing Committee on Defense, while actor turned politician and the BJP's first-time parliamentarian Kangana Ranaut was assigned to the committee on Information Technology (IT) and Communications, the Rajya Sabha Secretariat said in a notification.

Gandhi, who is also the Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House, was a member of the Defense Committee in the previous Lok Sabha too. The committee will be chaired by Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, Radha Mohan Singh.

The Congress has been given the chair of four committees, including the one for External Affairs, which will be led by its former Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor.

The Congress will also lead the committees on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports - to be chaired by Digvijaya Singh- Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Food Processing by former Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Channi, and Rural and Panchayati Raj to be chaired by Saptagiri Sankar Ulaka. Pertinently, seven-time MP and former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has not been named.

Members from the ruling BJP will chair key committees of which Ranaut is a member including Defence, Finance, Home, and Coal, Mines, and Steel, as well as Communications and IT. Home Affairs will be led by Radha Mohan Das Agrawal. The prestigious Standing Committee on Finance will be led by Bhartruhari Mahtab, who served as Pro-Tem Speaker.

Former union ministers Anurag Thakur and Rajiv Pratap Rudy will lead the committees on Coal, Mines and Steel, and Water Resources, while Nishikant Dubey gets the Communications and IT.

Pertinently, in the previous Lok Sabha Dubey and the Congress' Shashi Tharoor had a bitter spat over social media giant Facebook's rules for hate speech on its platform, which led to the replacement of the Congress leader as the committee head in 2022 by BJP MP.

Among other opposition parties and leaders, the Samajwadi Party's Jaya Bachchan joins fellow actor Ranaut in the Communications and IT committee. Priyanka Chaturvedi, from the Shiv Sena group led by former Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, joins the two of them.

Trinamool MP Mahua Moitra - whose disqualification from the last Lok Sabha hogged the limelight - is also a member of the Communications and IT committee. Tiruchi Siva and Kanimozhi of Tamil Nadu's DMK, will chair Industry and Consumer Affairs, and Food and Public Distribution.

Several allies of the BJP - which won the recent general election, thanks to 53 seats from its National Democratic Alliance partners - have been given leadership of one committee each. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu's TDP and his Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar's JDU will lead Housing and Urban Affairs, and Transport, Tourism, and Culture.

These two parties together won 28 Lok Sabha seats.

Ahead of the election in Maharashtra later this year, the BJP's state allies - the Shiv Sena faction of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) group of his deputy, Ajit Pawar – have also been named. Leaders from their parties will head the committees on Energy and Petroleum and Natural Gas panel.

Each department-related standing committee - which has representation from across party lines will act as 'mini parliaments' and keep a tab on the functioning of their related ministries.

Pertinently each committee is a combination of members from both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha.