The BJP high command has summoned the top party leaders of Jammu and Kashmir to New Delhi on Monday for consultation on replacing its present set of ministers in the PDP-BJP coalition ministry headed by Mehbooba Mufti.

It is learnt that consultations between the central and state leadership of the BJP would be held on Monday and Tuesday on the issue of finalizing the list of its new ministers.

Those who have been summoned to the national capital from here are, Sat Sharma, state BJP chief, Ashok Kaul, state organizing secretary and Nirmal Singh, deputy chief minister. Ram Madhav, national general secretary of BJP, would hold initial consultations with the state leaders and later discuss it with the BJP President, Amit Shah, before giving green signal to the new list of ministers.

The new ministers of the BJP are expected to be sworn later this week here before the civil secretariat shuts for its move to Srinagar for summers.

There were reports that atelast five of the existing eight ministers of BJP might be replaced. Two ministers were dropped last week for having participated in a rally of the Hindu Ekta Manch and supported the demand for CBI probe into the rape-murder of a minor girl in the Kathua district.

Rejig of the cabinet by replacing the BJP ministers, whose resignations were taken last week, has been necessitated amidst complaints of BJP and RSS activists that they had miserably failed to deliver as a result of which the graph of BJP has nosedived in Jammu where the party for the first time won 25 seats in the last Assembly elections and coming to power by supporting the PDP.

However, Mehbooba has yet to undertake the exercise of recasting the PDP representatives in her cabinet. The education minister Altaf Bukhari was holding additional portfolio of finance after the senior PDP leader Haseeb Drabu was sacked from the ministry last month for stating that Kashmir was not a political issue. There was resentment in a section of the PDP on the issue of Mehbooba making Bukhari a powerful minister by giving him the important portfolios of education and finance.

Naeem Akhtar, works minister, had offered to shed the education portfolio when Bukhari had last year expressed annoyance for not getting some important portfolio. Akhtar has been a trusted man of Mufti Sayeed, Mehbooba’s father, and worked in his personal staff when Mufti was Home Minister at the centre.