Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has reconstituted the National Integration Council bringing in new faces, including Union Ministers A K Antony, Mamata Banerjee, Veerappa Moily and Kapil Sibal.
Among the new entrants in the council headed by the Prime Minister, which will now have 147 members, are Ambika Soni, Dayanidhi Maran and Salman Khursheed have made their entry as Union Ministers while BJP leaders Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley have come in as Leaders of Opposition in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi, BJP President Nitin Gadkari, CPI-M General Secretary Prakash Karat, CPI General Secretary A B Bardhan will be members of the NIC as leaders of national parties while Farooq Abdullah, Ajit Singh, Sukhbir Singh Badal, N Chandrababu Naidu, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Sharad Yadav and Mehbooba Mufti are among the leaders of regional parties who have been included.
All state chief ministers and chief ministers of Delhi and Puducherry will be members along with chairmen of National Commissions.
Among the names which figured in the outgoing council and do not figure now are J Jayalalithaa, Ram Vilas Paswan, S Jaipal Reddy, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Arjun Singh. Shivraj Patil and H R Bhardwaj, who have now become Governors, also do not figure in the list.
Industrialists Venu Srinivasan, Azim Premzi, Yogi Deveshwar and A M Naik have been included along with Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India.
Among the eminent public figures those who find place now are Somnath Chatterjee, Sitaram Yechury, C K Jaffer Sharief, Asauddin Owaisi, Shabana Azmi, Amar Singh and Rajnath Singh.
Women representatives in the council include Ela R Bhatt, V Mohini Giri, Annie Raja and Neerja Chowdhary.
N Ravi, Mammen Mathew, Shobhana Bhartia, Shekhar Gupta, T N Ninan, K N Tilak Kumar, P Sainath, M K Razdan, Kumar Ketkar, Shashi Shekhar and Shravan Garg are among the media personalities nominated to the council.
Additional Inputs: PTI
