President Droupadi Murmu on Monday appointed governors in four states and changed the charge of two. In all, six new appointments have been announced.
Om Prakash Mathur, who was the Governor of Sikkim, has been given charge of Keralam, while Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar, who was the governor of Keralam, has now been appointed as the governor of Tamil Nadu.
Four new faces
The four new governors picked by the Bharatiya Janata Party are in line with the party’s social engineering formula of giving representation to non-dominant and marginalised castes.
BJP’s former national general secretary Dushyant Gautam has been appointed as the governor of Sikkim.
Mohan Ram, who was a member of the Lok Sabha from Palamu constituency in Jharkhand from 1996 to 2004, has been appointed as governor of Odisha.
He and Dushyant Gautam are both Dalit leaders who have contested elections and held organisational positions.
Gautam, who was a BJP national general secretary, contested polls from Delhi but did not win. In 2020, he was elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha from Haryana. Ram represented Palamu seat in Jharkhand in the Lok Sabha thrice; he was first elected in 1996. He was elected to the state assembly MLA when Jharkhand was part of Bihar.
Sudha Yadav, a member of the BJP parliamentary board, has been appointed as Governor of Karnataka. She is the second woman to have been appointed to the parliamentary board. She earlier represented Mahendragarh in Haryana in the Lok Sabha from 1994 to 2004. Her late husband, Sukhbir Singh Yadav, was martyred in the Kargil War.
Dr Dhal Singh Bisen has been appointed as the Governor of the poll-bound state of Uttarakhand. Bisen is a former legislator and minister in the Madhya Pradesh government (2003-2005) and was also a member of the state Finance Commission.
Bisen was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2019 from Balaghat. He did not contest the 2024 polls.
Sudha Yadav and Dhal Singh Bisen are both OBC leaders.