Nobody gives up a Rajya Sabha seat with three and a half years left on it for nothing. Keep that number in mind while you read this story.
On Thursday, President Droupadi Murmu accepted the resignation of Dr L Murugan from the Union Council of Ministers, with immediate effect. The Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said the acceptance was on the Prime Minister’s advice, under clause (2) of Article 75 of the Constitution. Murugan had quit on Tuesday as Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting and Parliamentary Affairs.
In his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Murugan said he wanted to return to Tamil Nadu to dedicate himself full-time to strengthening the BJP’s organisation in the state. The Times of India reported that he framed it as groundwork ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha elections. He also asked to be allowed to relinquish his Rajya Sabha membership, a seat he has held since September 2021 and was re-elected to from Madhya Pradesh in April 2024. That term runs to April 2030.
The L Murugan resignation in 60 seconds
Strip the story to its bones and it reads simply. A junior minister asked to leave. The President agreed. The stated reason is party work back home. But resignations in Delhi are rarely just about what the letter says, which is why this one has set off the capital’s favourite parlour game: guessing when the Cabinet reshuffle comes.
Here is the timeline that makes this interesting.
June: George Kurian, Minister of State, resigns after the BJP decides not to renominate him to the Rajya Sabha.
July: Ravneet Singh Bittu follows the same route out, for the same reason.
October: the L Murugan resignation makes it three ministers of state out in four months.
Bittu has since been asked to work in poll-bound Punjab. Kurian is back at the grassroots in Kerala. Murugan now heads to Tamil Nadu. Three different states, one common thread: Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu are all states where the BJP is still in expansion mode, trying to build a base where it has historically been weak.
Two ways to read one exit
Reading one: this is the sound of a reshuffle being assembled. Four berths in the Council of Ministers now stand vacant, The Tribune reported, and vacancies have a way of getting filled when the political calendar demands it. Earlier, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan also stepped down from the Cabinet, with Pralhad Joshi holding the education charge. Add Hardeep Puri and B L Verma, who were denied renomination but continue as ministers and can stay on for six months after their terms expire in November, and you have a Cabinet with a lot of moving parts. Pankaj Chaudhary and Harsh Malhotra, meanwhile, were made BJP presidents of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi while keeping their ministerial berths. Something, eventually, has to give.
Reading two: there is no reshuffle coming, at least not soon, and that is the point. The BJP has a habit of moving its second-rung leaders out of Delhi’s ministerial bungalows and into state organisation work when elections approach. A minister in Delhi attends meetings. A full-time organiser in Chennai or Kochi builds booths. The party has done this before, and the fact that all three departing ministers of state were redirected to grassroots work in difficult states suggests design, not drift.
It is worth noticing who gets sent where. The BJP does not send its heavyweights to do booth-level work in states it cannot win yet. It sends exactly this profile: loyal, low-ego, organisationally minded. The reward, historically, comes later. And that is the checkable detail the wire reports will not give you. Look at the post-resignation postings, not the resignation letters. Kurian to Kerala, Bittu to Punjab, Murugan to Tamil Nadu. If these were punishments, the party would not be handing the men new assignments in the same breath. This looks like redeployment.
What Delhi will ask next
The capital has had a crowded political fortnight. The Supreme Court is hearing challenges to the voter-roll revision, with Rahul Gandhi’s petition now carrying a diary number. The Jantar Mantar protest site was denotified this week. Even Bollywood-adjacent politics made the news, with actor Imran Khan told to leave India by October 28 over a protest appearance. Against that noise, a quiet ministerial exit barely registers. But quiet exits are often the ones that matter.
So here is the question worth carrying into the weekend. Four vacancies, a winter session approaching, and a party that keeps sending its ministers back to the states. Does Narendra Modi fill those berths soon, signalling a refreshed team for the run-up to 2029? Or does he leave them empty, running lean while the organisation does the heavy lifting? Delhi will read the answer in the next list of names. Watch for it.