Hemant Soren wins House trust with 45 votes, fills all 12 cabinet slots

RANCHI: Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren sailed through the first trust vote of his third term in the assembly Monday with 45 votes out of 74, including those of the two renegade JMM legislators facing disciplinary action for having contested the Lok Sabha polls as Independents.
BJP-led opposition staged a walkout during the vote, saying Hemant's return to the helm was the start of another phase of dynastic governance.
" You have seen how opposition behaved during trust vote. I thank the speaker for conducting the vote smoothly," said the CM. For the first time in close to a decade, the new govt will have 12 cabinet ministers as Hemant inducted 3 new faces while benching his brother & Dumka MLA Basant Soren. Fresh inclusions are JMM's Baidnath Ram (Latehar) and Congress MLAs Deepika Pandey Singh (Mahagama) & Irfan Ansari (Jamtara).
Stand-in CM Champai Soren, who resigned on July 3 to make way for Hemant, was made minister for water resources and higher education department. The buzz before the swearing-in by governor C P Radhakrishnan was that Champai will be deputy CM.
Hemant, whose return was always a possibility despite JMM's denial after he got bail in the Ranchi land scam case on June 28, apparently decided to take over after a prod from Congress' Sonia Gandhi.
Before trust vote, Hemant said in the assembly that there was ample time to respond to the alleged conspiracy to keep him in jail for five months.
Leader of opposition Amar Kumar Bauri said Hemant had little choice but to expand his cabinet after the floor test because he had no control over MLAs of INDIA bloc.