New Delhi: Former union minister and BJP leader Manoj Sinha (61) was on Thursday appointed the new Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir as per a Rashtra Bhawan communication issued in the morning, after GC Murmu resigned as the first Lt Governor of the UT.
Sinha, who was a minister of state for railways and MoS of communication as an independent charge in the first Modi government, was tipped to be the Uttar Pradesh chief minister until Yogi Adityanath pipped him. A 3-term Lok Sabha member, Sinha lost the 2019 election from Ghazipur to the BSP's Afzal Ansari and remained without work until now.
Murmu (60), who abruptly resigned on Wednesday, is a 1985 batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre. He was the principal secretary to the Prime Minister until last year when he was told to take charge of J&K after removal of its special status under Article 370 of the Constitution.
Sinha, MTech in civil engineering from the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), started his political career in 1982 when he was elected president of the BHU Students Union. He was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996 and 1999. He was elected to the House for the third term in 2014.
A low profile politician and a silent performer, Sinha is a firm administrator and an agriculturist at heart with strong ability to connect with the masses, especially at the rural level. He was declared among the best performing MPs in the 13th Lok Sabha and counted among seven most honest MPs in the last Lok Sabha by a leading English magazine.
The government on Thursday appointed Murmu as the new Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India on the retirement of Rajiv Mehrishi, a former union home secretary and finance secretary and a 1978 batch IAS officer of Rajasthan cadre, on turning 65 on August 8, the upper age limit for the constitutional post.
