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Breaking: Salman Khursheed wins law ministry from Moily

Khursheed: Law in safe hands?
Khursheed: Law in safe hands?

Salman Khursheed has replaced Veerappa Moily as the new law minister with Moily taking on the corporate affairs portfolio in the second cabinet reshuffle just announced by prime minister Manmohan Singh-led UPA government this year.

Khursheed told NDTV that the appointment was a great honour although it was a “very very tough job” he had been given which he was very determined about. He added that the cabinet had to work very hard for two years to get re-elected with a bright leadership.

The oath of office and secrecy shall be administered by the President of India at 5pm today to Khursheed and others with the four most important ministries finance, defence, home and external affairs remaining unchanged, according to a press release from the PIB.

Born in 1953, Kursheed was elected to the tenth Lok Sabha in 1991 and the same year he was made the union deputy minister in the commerce ministry.
In 1993 he was appointed union minister of state in the external affairs department.

The next milestones he achieved in his political career were when he was appointed the president of Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee in 1999 and the general secretary of All India Congress Committee in 2004. Kursheed was there after elected to the fifteenth Lok Sabha in 2009 which was his second term. He retains his post as minorities minister but is giving up the water portfolio.

Khursheed was designated a senior advocate at Supreme Court of India and senior counsel in 1999. In the early 1980s he was also a senior partner at Talib Luthra & Associates and lists an “extensive chamber and court practice especially in commercial, consitutional, airlines, press law and administrative law”.

Moily: big plans
Moily: big plans

According to his Lok Sabha profile his interests are “theatre, reading (history and biographies) and media” and had read an undergraduate in law at Oxford University.

Moily was wrongly tipped earlier this year in January to lose the law ministry, a post he took up in May 2009.

Moily has announced a number of ambitious reform plans in his tenure, including a “national litigation policy” to cut the cases of government departments and pendency of cases.

He had remained non-committal on the issue of allowing foreign law firms to enter, unlike his predecessor HR Bhardwaj.

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