Destiny came calling on senior BJP leader Bandaru Dattatreya, when he received a phone call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, informing him that he was being inducted into the Union Cabinet as part of its expansion on Sunday.
The fact that it came as a surprise to him was acknowledged by Mr. Dattareya himself when he openly said on Saturday that he was happy when Mr. Modi called to tell him that he needed to be in Delhi on Sunday for the swearing-in. “Such a call came from A.B. Vajpayee in the past and a similar call from Mr. Modi now has excited me,” Mr. Dattatreya, the national vice-president of the BJP, said.
The 68-year-old four-time MP from Secunderabad would be the lone representative in the Union Cabinet from the new-born Telangana State. However, it would be the third time that Mr. Dattatreya is being included in the Union Ministry. Earlier, he served as the Union Minister of State for Urban Development, Poverty Alleviation and Railways in the A.B. Vajpayee Cabinets during 1998-99 and 2000-04.
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After failing to make it to the Narendra Modi Cabinet in May, Mr. Dattatreya, who rose from the ranks of a full-time RSS ‘pracharak’ before joining BJP in 1980, had to be content with being the lone MP of BJP from Telangana. Senior Congress leader S. Jaipal Reddy, Sarvey Satyanarayan and M. Balram Naik from Telangana were in the last Union Cabinet of Manmohan Singh.