# Twenty Ministers for Karnataka, Approved in Delhi, Including the Man Who Will Referee the Assembly > The Congress leadership has cleared the list and it went to the Chief Minister as a letter. Alongside the ministers it settled who will be proposed as Speaker, which is an office the House is supposed to fill itself. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/karnataka-cabinet-expansion-20-names - Author: India Max Staff - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-08-03T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-03T14:00:00.000Z - Tags: Karnataka, Congress, Cabinet, Legislature --- The Congress high command approved the induction of 20 legislators into the Karnataka Cabinet on Monday, ten of them new to ministerial office. Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar received the list in a letter the same day, with the swearing in expected in Bengaluru that evening and a traffic advisory issued for the city. The same clearance covered the legislature's own presiding officers. G.S. Patil has been proposed as Speaker of the Assembly and A.S. Ponanna as Deputy Speaker, with Saleem Ahmed named for Chairperson of the Council and Umashree for Deputy Chairperson. The cabinet part of this is ordinary. Ministers serve at the pleasure of the chief minister in form and at the pleasure of the party in fact, and no national party in India selects a state cabinet without its central leadership signing off. Twenty inductions with half of them new faces is the expected shape of a rebalancing after a change of chief minister, which Karnataka has recently had. The presiding officers are a different matter and pass without comment far too easily. A Speaker is not a member of the government. The office belongs to the legislature, is filled by a vote of the House, and exists to hold the ring between the treasury benches and the opposition. That a candidate for it is settled in Delhi and communicated to the state along with a ministerial list treats the chair as one more post in the party's gift. The vote in the Assembly still happens, and with the numbers as they are its outcome is known before it is held. This is not a Congress peculiarity and it would be dishonest to present it as one. Every party with a national leadership does the same, and the practice has hardened over decades under all of them. It is worth naming anyway, because of what the Speaker's chair decides. Anti-defection petitions are ruled on by the Speaker, and the timing of those rulings has repeatedly determined whether a state government survives, in Karnataka as much as anywhere. An office with that much leverage over the life of a government is not a routine appointment, and the manner of filling it is not a detail. For Shivakumar the arithmetic of the list matters more than the principle. A cabinet expansion after a leadership change is where the accommodation gets done: who is being brought in, which faction each of the ten new ministers belongs to, and which claims have been deferred rather than met. Those deferred claims are the ones to watch, because they are the material out of which the next round of Karnataka Congress trouble gets built. The portfolios, which the list itself does not settle, will say more than the names. The immediate effect is that a government that has been running with vacancies now has a full bench, two days after the Chief Minister convened an all-party meeting on the Cauvery releases and asked protesters to call off a bandh. He now has ministers to send to the districts, which is what he told that meeting he intended to do. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/karnataka-cabinet-expansion-20-names.