President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday evening appointed former diplomat Taranjit Singh Sandhu as the new lieutenant governor of Delhi and shifted retired IPS officer RN Ravi from Tamil Nadu to West Bengal, as part of a wider reshuffle across nine regions that came just weeks before high-stakes assembly elections.
Ravi will succeed CV Ananda Bose, whose resignation was accepted by the President, a communique issued by her office said.
Delhi’s lieutenant governor Vinai Kumar Saxena was appointed the lieutenant governor of Ladakh, and the current incumbent of Lok Niwas in the Union Territory, Kavinder Gupta, was shifted to Himachal Pradesh.
Sandhu, a former Indian ambassador to the US, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party and was fielded as the party candidate in Amritsar in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. His appointment in the Capital comes a year after the BJP won the assembly polls.
Ravi – who repeatedly clashed with the state government in Tamil Nadu, leading to cases in the Supreme Court – moves to Bengal with just weeks to go for the assembly elections. The term of the state’s assembly expires on May 7. Ravi allegedly sat on bills, refused to read from the text prepared by the state government in assembly several times and was embroiled in numerous controversies involving the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government.
Former Bihar assembly speaker Nand Kishore Yadav was appointed governor of Nagaland and Lt. General (retired) Syed Ata Hasnain was named the new governor of Bihar – the announcement coming hours after Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar submitted his nomination for the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections, effecting a tectonic shift in state politics.
Kerala governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar will discharge the functions of governor of Tamil Nadu, the press release said.
Himachal Pradesh governor Shiv Pratap Shukla was named the new governor of Telangana in place of Jishnu Dev Varma, who was appointed the new Maharashtra governor.
Earlier on Thursday evening, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had expressed her shock at the developments.
“I am shocked and deeply concerned by the sudden news of the resignation of Shri C. V. Ananda Bose, the governor of West Bengal…Union home minister just informed me that Shri R.N. Ravi is being appointed as governor of West Bengal. He never consulted with me as per the established convention in this regard,” Banerjee had said on X.
“The reasons behind his resignation are not known to me at this moment. However, given the prevailing circumstances, I would not be surprised if the governor has been subjected to some pressure from the Union home minister to serve certain political interests on the eve of the forthcoming state assembly elections,” Banerjee added in the post on X.
Like his predecessor Jagdeep Dhankhar, Bose’s tenure, too, was marked by an acrimonious relationship between the Trinamool Congress and the Lok Bhavan.
Gupta was moved from Ladakh just seven-and-a-half months after taking charge of the Union Territory that has been embroiled in a protracted agitation demanding statehood and safeguards under the sixth schedule of the Constitution.
On September 24 last year, at least four people were killed and around 100 injured in Leh after a mass agitation, demanding full statehood and protections for jobs and land, turned violent.