President appoints governors of Goa, Haryana and Lt Governors for Ladakh

New Delhi: Former Civil Aviation Minister P Ashok Gajapathi Raju and former West Bengal BJP chief Prof Ashim Kumar Ghosh were on Monday appointed Governors of Goa and Haryana respectively while former Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh.

The appointments will take effect from the dates they will assume charge of their respective offices, a Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said.

Raju, a TDP leader close to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, succeeds PS Sreedharan Pillai, a former Kerala BJP president. Pillai has been a Governor since 2019, first being assigned to Mizoram and then to Goa in July 2021.

In Haryana, Ghosh replaces veteran RSS leader Bandaru Dattatraya, who was first appointed Governor of Himachal Pradesh in September 2019 and then transferred to Haryana in July 2021. Ghosh is a former political science professor and was BJP West Bengal president between 1999 and 2001.

After accepting the resignation of Brigadier (Dr) BD Mishra (retired), the President has also appointed Kavinder Gupta as the Lieutenant Governor of union territory of Ladakh.

Gupta is the first politician to be appointed LG of Ladakh after the bifurcation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories in 2019. The first to be appointed LG was former Defence Secretary Radha Krishna Mathur, who resigned in February 2023,and succeeded by Brigadier Mishra.