Mumbai: From September 2017 to May 2019, Nirmala Sitharaman, who has served as Defense Minister in the Narendra Modi government, has been appointed as the new finance minister.
Nirmala Sitharaman is the first woman finance minister, although Indira Gandhi took over as finance minister in the post of prime minister in 1970-71.
Rajya Sabha member, 60-year-old Nirmala Sitharaman, is the second woman to take charge of the important ministry after Indira Gandhi, who also took the portfolio in the form of Prime Minister in the seventies.
After the party’s spectacular victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, sources had said that Arun Jaitley was not interested in taking a ministerial position in the new Modi government.
Nirmala Sitharaman joined the BJP in 2008 and worked as a party spokesperson. In 2014, he was inducted as a junior minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet and in June 2014, he was elected as Rajya Sabha member from Andhra Pradesh.
In May 2016, he was one of the 12 candidates nominated by the BJP to contest the Rajya Sabha elections on June 11, 2016. He successfully contested his constituency from Karnataka. On 3 September 2017, he was promoted to Defense Minister, only to be the second woman after Indira Gandhi to take over as the Defense Minister.
