Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Lok Sabha member from Visakhapatnam Kambhampati Hari Babu has been appointed as the Governor of Mizoram state.
President of India Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday issued orders reshuffling Governors of various states and making new appointments on the recommendations of the Narendra Modi government.
Hari Babu, who represented Visakhapatnam parliamentary constituency between 2014 and 2018 as part of alliance with the Telugu Desam Party, served as the president of the Andhra Pradesh unit of BJP from 2014 to 2018.
He was replaced by Kanna Lakshminarayana in May 2018 as the state BJP president. He did not contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 as the BJP high command gave the ticket to former Union minister Daggubati Purandeshwari.
Though Hari Babu has been lying low in the party for the last two years, the BJP leadership has acknowledged his serves as the MP as well as the president of Andhra Pradesh’s BJP unit and rewarded him with the Governor post.
Another important change made by the Centre as part of the reshuffle of the Governors, veteran leader and former Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya has been shifted from Himachal Pradesh to Haryana as the Governor.
Dattatreya, who played a major role in the BJP as the president of the party in combined Andhra Pradesh state, Lok Sabha member and also as the Union minister of state for rural development and later for labour department, was appointed as the Governor of Himachal Pradesh in September 2019.
There were reports then that Dattatreya had requested for shifting from Himachal Pradesh to any southern state as he could not adjust to the climatic conditions in the Himalayan state. But it did not materialise.
Now, within two years of his stint in Himachal, the Centre shifted him to Haryana, which has better climate and is closer to Delhi.
Among the other changes made in the gubernatorial positions are:
P.S. Sreedharan Pillai, Governor of Mizoram has been transferred and appointed as Governor of Goa; Satyadev Narayan Arya, Governor of Haryana has been transferred and appointed as Governor of Tripura and Ramesh Bais, Governor of Tripura has been shifted to Jharkhand.
The newly appointed Governors are: Thaawarchand Gehlot as Governor of Karnataka; Mangubhai Chhaganbhai Patel as Governor of Madhya Pradesh and Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar as Governor of Himachal Pradesh.
“The above appointments will take effect from the dates they assume charge of their respective offices,” a communique from Rashtrapathi Bhavan said.